I finally received my nScope lab kit from backing the project on kickstarter, and started playing around with it and its API. Even despite its lack of documentation, it’s surprisingly straight forward, giving you access to four signal generators (two analog and two pulse) which can also be used as outputs, four analog inputs, and the ability to easily power a breadboard via USB.

After toying with some of the components they shipped with it and making some blinkenlights and various simple circuits, I realized that they shipped me a potentiometer (a “volume knob”-type component). Now, I’ve spent the last few weeks reverse engineering and developing a library for accessing GPU overclock functions (lib_gpu), and this seemed like a perfect opportunity to put it to an actual physical use.

So I trivially wired up the potentiometer to feed its output straight into channel 1 of the nScope, like so:

Then I cloned the nScope API and started editing the program.py file found in the python folder to make a dummy program that wires together the input from nScope and feeds it into my lib_gpu library:

The way the code works is pretty straight forward: the potentiometer feeds a value between 0.0 and 5.0 into nScope channel 1, which the code polls once every so often. This value is then converted into a percentage (rounded to nearest 5%) and multiplied with the hardcoded maximum GPU Core MHz offset (nVIDIA overclocking is based on offset values, not absolute values) to get the new value. This lets me select the overclock from +0 MHz to +150 MHz (which happens to be the highest stable value for my card) using the potentiometer as a “GPU speed knob.”

The program took me about 15 minutes to cobble together (thank you, time spent on the simple FFI interface to lib_gpu) and is spectacularly useless. However, it was fun and showcases some minor usage of the nScope API and my own lib_gpu library. Plus I get to turn a nifty blue knob to overclock my GPU, how cool is that?