I have a DMM6500 now on my desk, a colleague of mine bought one to the company. This is a seriously confusing and disappointing bit of gear. First of all, I had a BSOD on it. And the entire digitize and trigger model is just complicated as hell. With some settings, the screen just start blinking, showing random data. With some other settings it takes measurement every now and then, and it just extrapolates the data between it? Or it shows me that the maximum number of samples can only be 7870020 samples, and then doesnt fill in this number into the input field?
It feels like this was made by robots, who wanted to tick all the boxes, but no real though put into how to use a meter.
This dmm has a whole new approach as we know of the previous conventional type with measuring instruments of this type and offers far more possibilities. This gives rise to the problem of the gui developers of casting these into a mould which, on the one hand, must be consistent in terms of its technical possibilities and, on the other hand, must be as conclusive as possible from the user's point of view.
This results in two learning curves
- for the developers to integrate these comprehensive new possibilities into the matching gui and api,
- for the user to discover this new concept to make it usable for oneself by sorting out this mistakes despite the imperfect previous named path.
That is the compromise to be entered into, which we have to go together with such kind of measuring instruments.
We remember that gui and programming interfaces of measuring instruments of the previous conventional type have undergone decades of development on both sides.
Another compromise is the much cheaper technical implementation compared to his bigger brother DMM7510.