It seems like holiday decorations come up earlier and earlier every year. You might not have room for a full-blown tree in your lab, but if you have an arbitrary waveform generator and a scope, Tektronix has a way for you to show your spirit electronically.

You can see the video below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXrd6KFaIHI

Using a simple circuit described at http://tubetime.us/?p=96, you can actually watch NTSC video on any oscilloscope that has a Z-axis input. I’m using a Tek 465M but even a cheap knockoff brand analog scope will work. You could try it with a digital scope but you’ll soon learn that this is one area where old school analog works better…

Another “Back to Basics” video: This video takes a fairly detailed look at the basics of Lissajous patterns on an oscilloscope. There are a LOT of videos that show Lissajous patterns on YouTube, but not too many that describe the mechanism behind these patterns. Several of my YouTube viewers have asked for this topic, so here we are. Some low-speed waveforms are used so that the trace movement that draws the Lissajous figures can be seen and understood.

Time to draw nice pictures with sound to showcase it! And when the Tek is paired with music from talented Austria-based artist (not Dutch as I mistakenly say in the video) Jerobeam Fenderson, it becomes truly spectacular.
Music files can be obtained from:
http://oscilloscopemusic.com/

This is a beautiful way to teach beginners how we can take mathematical constructs like sine waves, cosine waves, and sawtooth waveforms and use them to create abstract representations

Oscilloscope art is a fascinating pursuit in which waveforms are generated for the X an Y channels of an oscilloscope to draw pictures on its screen. It’s somewhat distinct from vector computer graphics

If you’d like to explore the topic as a mild diversion, then maybe this Javascript oscilloscope art generator from [Neil Fraser] might be of interest. In around a hundred lines of code he’s created an in-browser scratchpad upon which a waveform can be drawn which will then be created as an audio signal on your computer’s soundcard. Hook up left and right to X and Y of your oscilloscope, and what you scribbled on the pad should pop up on the screen.

JS Oscilloscope
https://neil.fraser.name/news/2018/01/25/

Plug your computer’s audio output into an oscilloscope (right = X, left = Y), then use your mouse to draw in the square below

This is all done with about a hundred lines of JavaScript (view source to see it). The mouse’s X-Y movements are recorded, then encoded as the right-left channels of a dynamically generated WAV file. This file is URI-encoded and played. Pretty straight-forward.