I’ve been starting to work on a hardware agnostic “mixed signal” PC software for analysing data from multiple scopes, logic analysers etc that are in some way time correlated (e.g. common trigger.) Well that’s my plan anyway. Along the way I’ve built this bit of software that was really just to test out a bunch of .NET’s built in controls and classes for this particular application. I never actually built this for release, and it is a bit rough around the edges, but I figure as of current the 1000 series Rigol owners have nothing on that front, something’s better than nothing right?
Anyway, if you want to have a play with it, don’t expect it to be polished as I’m now putting my time into building the proper version from the ground up with largely all custom controls. But that’ll take a while with the amount of time it needs.
Note: If you've got an older machine, it’s going to seriously struggle with a meg of samples thrown at it, try it on normal memory depth first. That’s one of the reasons the MSchart control is unsuitable, it can bring a system to its knees pretty quickly with a lot of data.
You’re also going to need NI VISA 5.3 (runtime should be fine I think, but all my machines I've tested on have the full install,) and .NET 4.5 that’s the minimum for that version of VISA.
So a quick run through:
On the initial screen drop down the list and select your instrument. Hit connect, and as long as the connection was successful and the response from a *IDN? Query shows it’s a DS1102E or DS1052E, it’ll go green.
Hit acquire and it’ll load in whatever is currently in its memory, the points captured box represents the number of points per channel that have been captured. The X axis is in uS (yeah I know this looks crap, but I’m ditching the MSchart control for future.)
![](http://i1085.photobucket.com/albums/j432/harvie256/dataCaptured_zps55f9d4fb.png)
If you want to use the serial decoder, click on the D1 or D2 to bring up their setup. Should be pretty obvious.
![](http://i1085.photobucket.com/albums/j432/harvie256/decoderSetup_zps4d0fa3ca.png)
The offset buttons on the right just shift the channel up and down. On large memory captures this is painfully slow due to the speed of removing and adding points to the chart control.
Hit decode at the top to run the decoders, the bottom bars show the words. Blue is fine, red is a framing error, and purple is a parity error. Zooming in and out is done with the mouse wheel over the chart.
![](http://i1085.photobucket.com/albums/j432/harvie256/decoded_zpsf8884562.png)
The Open Data button for each of the decoders will bring up a list of all the data words found. The box at the bottom is a search box, with the arrows being forward and backward from the currently selected item. If you want to search for sequential words, put them in separated by commas or semi-colons.
![](http://i1085.photobucket.com/albums/j432/harvie256/wordSearch_zps0b23990c.png)
If you double click on a word, it’ll zoom and center the chart on that word. Clicking on a word on the decoder bars will add the vertical lines bounding what it thinks is the word.
![](http://i1085.photobucket.com/albums/j432/harvie256/zoomed_zps3788d729.png)
And that folks is about all for now. If you’ve got any thoughts for the real software build, feel free to post them and I’ll see if I can include them. Also let me know what you're throughts on the Microsoft One-Click installer are, first time I've used it and it seems pretty painless for all concerned.