PC-hosted test equipments

If you are occasionally involved in electronics, you’ll know that for most experiments and repairs you won’t get very far without the required test equipment. Luckily, a portion of the equipment doesn’t have to be physically present any longer, since that task can be taken over by a computer.A technician carrying out a practical experiment as part of his job or hobby always requires a number of test instruments to observe the effects of any adjustments. You soon build up a pile of equipment, like a function generator, power supply, multimeter and oscilloscope. It is not worth the effort and expense to acquire all those expensive instruments if they are only to be used occasionally. With the aid of the correct software, any PC with a soundcard can take over many of the tasks of the instruments just mentioned, as long as it involves fairly low frequency signals (up to about 20kHz). Extra hardware is absolutely not required.