Saving files on the Rigol scopes

[Simon]

Well to be honest I have read the manual and I'm still a bit clueless. How do I store data on a USB stick with my rigol scope ? the scenario being I'm capturing some back EMF spikes (well turns out more like oscillations but anyway) and I want to save the image or the data the scope has collected for review on a computer and to possibly compile into a report. How do I do this ?

[tecman]

I am not in front of the scope right now, but first you must plug in a usb memory stick.  Go to Storage, then External.  I believe that you can then create a new file and it will give you the opportunity to name it at that point.  You can save as a jpeg or a csv if you want to import into excel or similar.

Paul
 

[rossmoffett]

Those CSV files sure can take a long time to save and be up to 20 Mb, just fair warning.

[Simon]

yea so I discovered, 21.something MB for the full 1MSample readout. luckily for my current purposes at work they just want screen shots I think.

My next question was going to be: what can I do with a CVS file ? in excel it makes a horrible graph, is there a program that can interpret the info and display it interactively so that I can "zoom" into it and move it around ?

oh and after not being able to get a USB stick I discovered how cool it is to use my phone as a USB memory and then I can review the screenshot on the phone with people.

[alm]

You can edit the Excel graph to make it slightly less awful.

CSV files are especially useful if you want to process the data in some way. For simple graphs, a screenshot is easier and faster, and has the advantage that it conveniently shows range settings and measurements. A CSV file can be imported in any competent piece of data processing/calculation software (which doesn't include Excel), for example Matlab (or free clones like Octave). Matlab does allow you to zoom in on graphs. These do have a fairly steep learning curve. More dedicated would be something like SignalExpress, but that's probably quite expensive. These programs allow you to filter and analyze the data in various ways. If you just want a picture for documentation purposes, I'd stick to screenshots.

[Simon]

a screen shot will show hardly 480 samples but the CVS file can hold up to 1'000'000 samples. what I'm doing is recording the spikes that occur when switching fans, but these occur as continuous oscillations in bursts, so I can either view a crunched up version of the whole sequence or zoom in on one burst. if I could handle the CVS data easily I could expand the time axis and run the graph left and right.

Is the Rigol software any use for handling and capturing CVS data ? what i mean is will the pc software store a CVS file faster than the scope will on a usb stick ?

[rossmoffett]

My next question was going to be: what can I do with a CVS file ? in excel it makes a horrible graph, is there a program that can interpret the info and display it interactively so that I can "zoom" into it and move it around ?

I took a CSV (comma separated variable) file in to see if I could get a very good frequency estimate.  I noticed that it takes a sample every 2 ns, however, the time stamp does not reflect that.  It only records to the microsecond.  You need to re-label the data to reflect this, else a bunch of points get unnecessarily crowded into one spot on the x axis.

With the many sample points you can't graph them all at once, it'll crash your computer probably.

[Simon]

My next question was going to be: what can I do with a CVS file ? in excel it makes a horrible graph, is there a program that can interpret the info and display it interactively so that I can "zoom" into it and move it around ?

I took a CSV (comma separated variable) file in to see if I could get a very good frequency estimate.  I noticed that it takes a sample every 2 ns, however, the time stamp does not reflect that.  It only records to the microsecond.  You need to re-label the data to reflect this, else a bunch of points get unnecessarily crowded into one spot on the x axis.

With the many sample points you can't graph them all at once, it'll crash your computer probably.

I'm sure a quad core 2.4 GHz and 8 GB or Ram will manage it fine, the scope does

[rossmoffett]

I meant in Excel or OpenOffice.  In Excel you actually can't import all of the points to manipulate them in the first place, in OpenOffice you can only almost get all of them.  I don't know why they are so prone to crashing on me, maybe my little netbook or maybe the charting systems weren't meant to handle that much data.

[alm]

Generating a 1M points vector, calculating the sine of this, and plotting this took maybe three seconds in Octave (was too lazy to pop in the CD for the real Matlab, but I don't expect it to be slower). Which is why I suggested a competent piece of data processing/math software . I'm sure there are other good ones out there. A spreadsheet is a toy that lets people unfamiliar with programming or math do these things, with predictable results.

[Simon]

is Matlab or octave free ? where can I get them ?

[Matt]

Octave: http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/index.html

Matlab isn't free, info here: http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/

-Matt

[dengorius]

you can also take a look at Scilab - http://www.scilab.org it's another open source matlab clone

[joelby]

If you use the Rigol binary .dat format, the data files are only 1MB and save quickly. There's a Matlab thing that opens them here http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/18999-read-binary-rigol-waveforms, and I think there was a Python program that did the same.

[wd5gnr]

Octave: http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/index.html

Matlab isn't free, info here: http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/

-Matt

What about Freemat -- I'm not a Matlab maven but they say it is nearly compatible. http://freemat.sourceforge.net/

I've used SciLab which I like but I don't think it is very compatible. But I like it.

Al W.
http://www.hotsolder.com

[webrider99]

Well to be honest I have read the manual and I'm still a bit clueless. How do I store data on a USB stick with my rigol scope ? the scenario being I'm capturing some back EMF spikes (well turns out more like oscillations but anyway) and I want to save the image or the data the scope has collected for review on a computer and to possibly compile into a report. How do I do this ?

Hi Simon,  I am sure you have found this by now, but this is for the benefit of other newbies.

1. First you select the storage menu while a usb drive is present.
2. Then you press the storage grey button and use the pop-up to select the type of file to store.
3. Then you set the Data Depth to "displayed" or "maximum".
4. Then you set Para Save to ON/OFF as desired.
5. Then you select External.
6. Then you select New File.
7. Then you enter the new filename using the select knob.
8. Then you select Save and the file will be written to the USB device.

This procedure is not in the book, I found it via experimentation. I am currently working on a file save lesson to go with the others at
 https://www.youtube.com/user/lwgraves?feature=mhum#p/p

[Simon]

yea I got it figured