Siglent Technologies has kindly lent me their new SDS1204X-E oscilloscope (200 MHz, 4 channels) to help the lxi-tools open source effort
I hooked it up, calibrated the 4 included probes, and after enabling the network interface (DHCP) it was easily discovered with lxi-tools.
It turns out that this is an absolutely
blazingly fast scope, especially in terms of LXI/LAN SCPI command processing performance!
With the benchmark feature I'm getting ~1100 requests/s via TCP/VXI11:
$ lxi benchmark --address 192.168.1.125
Benchmarking by sending 1000 ID requests. Please wait...
Result: 1123.5 requests/second
And I get ~600 requests/s via TCP/RAW:
$ lxi benchmark --raw --address 192.168.1.125
Benchmarking by sending 1000 ID requests. Please wait...
Result: 1123.5 requests/second
This is quite impressive. Compared, the performance of e.g. the Rigol DS1054Z is ~30 requests/s via TCP/VXI11 and ~160 requests/s via TCP/RAW.
Of course, the faster performance is to be expected from a newly released scope which clearly uses a newer and faster chipset. However, fact still is, it is very fast and it is one of the first low cost scopes that makes it possible to easily implement a poor-mans data logger using LXI/LAN polling that can consistently sample data at e.g. 100 Hz or more.
I also notice that Siglent uses standard LXI ports as defined here:
http://www.lxistandard.org/About/LXI-Protocols.aspxThat is, the available network ports for the SDS1204X-E are:
$ nmap -p- 192.168.1.125
Starting Nmap 7.60 ( [url]https://nmap.org[/url] ) at 2018-01-08 15:18 CET
Nmap scan report for 192.168.1.125
Host is up (0.042s latency).
Not shown: 65529 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
23/tcp open telnet
80/tcp open http
111/tcp open rpcbind
918/tcp open unknown
5024/tcp open scpi-telnet
5025/tcp open scpi-raw
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 40.14 seconds
In particular, they use standard port 5025 for SCPI/RAW and port 5024 for SCPI/telnet. This is one of the odd things that Rigol fails to do for the DS1054Z (they place it on non-standard port 5555):
$ nmap -p- 192.168.1.210
Starting Nmap 7.60 ( [url]https://nmap.org[/url] ) at 2018-01-08 15:19 CET
Nmap scan report for 192.168.1.210
Host is up (0.080s latency).
Not shown: 65529 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
80/tcp open http
111/tcp open rpcbind
617/tcp open sco-dtmgr
618/tcp open dei-icda
619/tcp open compaq-evm
5555/tcp open freeciv
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 40.54 seconds
Taking a screenshot with the SDS1204X-E is very fast too:
$ time lxi screenshot -a 192.168.1.125
Loaded siglent-sds screenshot plugin
Saved screenshot image to screenshot_192.168.1.125_2018-01-08_15:37:22.bmp
real 0m0,141s
user 0m0,004s
sys 0m0,024s
Only ~0.14 second!
It's also nice to see that the Siglent scope has a small and light form factor which feels solid.
My first impressions are good - I'm looking forward to more testing with this instrument during the development of the GUI frontend for lxi-tools. It will also make a nice addition to the pool of instruments that I plan to use for lxi-tools performance and regression testing.