InstallationVisit
EEZ Studio home page and move down to
Download section with links to installation packages (with hash info) or visit
GitHub directly and choose installation package for your operating system. When installation is finished successfully run EEZ Studio and it will create database where all activities are stored, and install a set of so-called
instrument extensions for EEZ H24005, its simulator (if you can are interested, get it
here) and various Rigol's 1000 series MSO/DSO.
When EEZ Studio is up and running ESW home page is displayed. You can go back to this page anytime using its icon in upper left corner. Installation will also add three instruments: EEZ H24005, its simulator and one generic SCPI instrument that could be used as entry point to any SCPI instrument that can be accessed using one of two currently supported interfaces.
Deleting and adding instrumentsInstruments that are not needed can be easily removed from the ESW home page: just click on the instrument icon, and from right-click menu select
Delete. Deleted instrument goes to “recycle bin” which appears in upper right corder as
Deleted instruments. There you can restore instruments (and all interactions with it!) back to home page or remove it permanently.
Add instrument option in upper right corner allows you to add new instrument which has instrument extension installed (more about that in future posts). When selected, a list of all available instruments is displayed:
As an example Rigol DS1074Z-S will be added and few basic actions with it will be presented.
Right side of the ESW home page shows basic information about selected instrument that include available interfaces (supported in current ESW version) and its
history.
Instrument sessionWhen instrument is installed we are ready to start communicating with it. That can be done by selecting option
Open SCPI terminal or with double-click on instrument icon when new session window dedicated to that instrument is opened. ESW support work with multiple instruments, therefore one session window is opened for each instrument.
Please pay attention to the following session window options and sections:
- Header section contain information about instrument and connection status
- Shortcuts section is displayed on the bottom. Shortcuts could come with instrument extensions or can be added by user
- SCPI help can be reached by selecting the blue question mark option, in lower left corner
- Command line for sending SCPI command is also displayed but it's disabled if connection with instrument is not established
Let's continue with establishing connection. In case of Rigol, ESW in this version could offer only Ethernet connection. Rigol is using non-standard port
5555 (instead of 5025) that we have to enter together with its IP address (192.168.10.124 in my case) and select
Connect:
After the first successful connection we'll get something like this:
Take note that command line is now enabled and that connection status is changed. We can found in connection status section basic information about connection (e.g. IP address and port) and identification string received from instrument when standard *IDN? query is sent what represent the beginning of new session.
You can also see that all interaction are timestamped and all activities is recorded into instrument history.
Collecting measured dataWithout spending any more time for explaining anything else, we are now ready to collect measurements! In case of Rigol we prepared two predefined shortcuts:
Screenshot and
Waveform data. They are assigned to function keys F2 and F3 respectively (and that can be modified!) or can be execute by clicking on their buttons down in the shortcuts section.
The
Screenshot represent the most trivial and fastest way to collect measured data. Here is an example with two channels active:
Oops, I forgot to close connection info form, so here is another one
Received image is now stored into session history but it can be easily saved to disk or clipboard and we can add some note. The later option proved to be particularly useful: if you add a note shortly after making screenshot, about e.g. measurement conditions, expected and achieved results you are not risking to forgot a real meaning of it especially when multiple measurements are accomplished. All
note content is searchable and you can quickly come back to the right measurement no matter of how many hours, days or months passed. An example of adding note:
Added note appears below image and it can be further edited or completely deleted.
Now, let's see what can we get with
Waveform data shortkey. Contrary to previously presented
Screenshot shortkey that is sending a simple sequence of two commands: STOP and DISP:DATA?
Waveform data is a javascript that exchange multiple SCPI commands and raw data stored into Rigol's memory. Depending of number of active/displayed channels and selected timebase number of available samples could vary, but this script take care of all that so you just need to press F3 or click on it's button and we'll get the following:
This operation last for quite some time since it seems that Rigol has finite capability to make available samples for transfer and also limited output buffer. Therefore script has to ask for multiple chunks that are assembled into single graph before make it available on the screen. Hence multiple blue info boxes on the right side about script execution progress that will disappear shortly.
In this example we can see that
sampling rate was 500 MS/s and that Rigol provided 1 200 000 samples (1.14 Mb) per channel. As in previous example it's possible to add a note to each graph/recording and now we are in better position to inspect received data more closely: just by clicking on the graph it will be displayed over the complete session windows:
Configure option opens entry form preloaded with data received from the Rigol:
If you are missing black background that you have on instrument, simply select it as shown on the picture that follows. That is a global option and will affect all other graphs.
Graph data can be now zoomed in and out and
min-max is used as default rendering algorithm. Here is an example of zoomed in view:
Rigol, as I believe many others deploy various manipulations that data on the TFT LCD screen looks “better” or closer to analog scope. Therefore results taken as bitmap (screenshot) or presented as raw data could differ in appearance or “smoothness” or “sharpness”
. ESW for now, offers two other rendering algorithm
average and
gradually:
We can zoom-in extensively but not to infinity, or not beyond the limit of samples. If we go so far, each sample is starts to show as small ball connected with the “tail” to the zero for better indication that we reached sampling rate/resolution:
Data once transferred to the PC can be further processed using various math operations as today's DSO are doing in “realtime”. We believe that all what Rigol is already offering on the instrument will be add for offline processing in ESW.
Finally, for this basic presentation let's say a few words about before mentioned
SCPI help:
Here we have all Rigol SCPI commands "indexed" and searchable. Displayed command can be copied directly into session's command line. When executed Rigol will sent its respond. In first attempt that was an error since channel number was not specified. ACQuire:MDEPth? followed and another query with correctly specified channel number:
When we don't need to work with instrument, we can close the connection using the
Disconnect option, and that action will be also recorded into session history and displayed on the session window together with information about session duration:
I believe that this short presentation about basic operation with ESW will be inspirational enough for many of you to invest some time testing it, send us some feedback and even possibly decide to use it on the daily basis. Thanks a lot in advance for that!
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A note about including support for Rigol DSO/MSO: the reason for that is quite simple, that's currently only 3rd party SCPI capable instrument available to us (and used in “lab” work) so it was used as a guinea pig for testing ESW features. Hopefully over the time the situation with more directly support for other vendors will be better, and possibly some of their representative/employees who are scanning this forum recognize even in this early stage the potential of ESW and offer/borrow us something from their product line. We are quite open for such possibility and I believe that could be a win-win combination for all of us without fear that such deal could possibly cannibalize software solutions they are already offering.