Kerry Wong did a teardown of a vintage HP 7044A x-y recorder and programmed an Arduino Due to draw the Lorenz Atrractor using this recorder:
To test the recorder, I wrote a simple program using Arduino Due that generates a Lorenz attractor. The min/max boundaries for each axis were obtained prior and they are used to map the curve to the first quadrant since 7044A can only plot signals within a single quadrant at a time. Arduino Due is convenient because it has two 12bit DAC outputs which can be used to drive the X and Y channel.
Unlike using an oscilloscope, the recorder cannot record data that changes faster than a few Hertz. To slow down the output, you can either decrease the time interval (I chose 0.001) or add in additional delays. I used serial output to slow things down a bit, this is convenient as I could use the data when debugging the program as well.
More details at Kerry Wong’s blog.
Check out the video after the break.