IMHO that is mostly for people who still think they need to have buttons. On most touchscreen enabled test equipment I hardly use the buttons but some people insist on having buttons. MicSig for example offers versions of their tablet oscilloscopes which have buttons nowadays after starting out with button-less designs; it seems there is a large enough market for it.
mixsig has gotten it right. an oscilloscope leans itself nicely for touch . pinch to zoom etc. especially the newer version that has a couple of rotary knobs is really nice.
For a mulitmeter .. i don;t know. you can show some stats on the display if you want. but chart recording ? whenever i needed recording it was to plot behavior of a device over long time ( like battery charge / discharge ) , or pulsed behavior ( like a cellphone going from deep sleep to sleep to contacting the tower , to sending a message and going back to deep sleep. those are complex charts. not handy on a tiny screen. you want that data in a computer.
Same thing if you make a setup where you have an input multiplexer in front of your dmm. like when characterizing a D/A convertor.step ,measure, step , measure. you do that on mulitple devices, then run statistics between devices. none of that can be done on the machine itself. you need a data dump in excel or matlab.
ni-visa is the work of the devil. just install the base ieee-488 driver nd talk directly from excel. i have a small vba library that allows me to send scpi directly from excel and i made 'virtual instruments'
dim mydmm as new hp34401(17) ' new 34401 at gpib 17
dim vcc as new TTI340(12,1) ' new thurlby tandar power supply gpib address 12 , channel 1
dim vee as new TTI340(12,2) ' new thurlby tandar power supply gpib address 12 , channel 2
mydmm.range = voltsdc20 ' set to fixed 20 volts range DC
mydmm.digits = 6 '
mydmm.nplc=10
vcc.voltage = 5
vcc.currlimit =0.1
vee.voltage = 3.3
vee.currlimit = 0.1
tti340(12).alloutputson
tti340(12).attachexceptionhandler shutdown(event)
for x = 1 to 10
vcc.voltage = 5v + (x/10)
activecell.text = mydmm.read
nextcol
activecell.text = vcc.voltage.set
nextcol
activecell.text = vcc.voltage.read
nextcol
activecell.text = vcc.current.read
newrow
next
tti340(12).alloutputsoff
sub shutdown(event)
select case event
case overcurrent
tti340(12).alloutputsoff
msgbox "overcurrent detected. system safed and stopped"
end
case else
' there ain't any others
endcase
end sub
this would give me a table with dmm reading , set vcc , actual vcc (measured through the psu) , current draw on vcc
if i need ot do that on a device that has 4 output : instantiate a 34970 relay multiplexer and put another for-next loop that switches the relay.
mymux= new hp34970(15,1) ' gpib 15 , relay card 1
for y = 1 to 4
mymux.channel = y
' blabla
next y
i have virtualisations for all the instruments i use. if tomorrow i dont have a 34401 but a keithley 2002 all i do is change the instance. the virtual machines use the same syntax. so i don't need to alter my code.
mydmm = new keithley2002(COM1) ' COM1 is constant larger than gpib address 32. if the driver gets an 'impossible' gpib address it subtracts 32 and opens COMx instead of GPIB
mydmm.serialinterface (9600,n,8,1)
the rest of the code is unchanged.