Regarding the possibility of a "remote UI": that prompts curiosity as to opportunities for adding a minimal external controller box with whatever UI knobs etc one might prefer... say an Arduino via USB or Ethernet.
Yup, had pretty much the same idea. I do something similar for my own scpi controlled little projects. I've only recently started doing this, but so far I like it ... for the most part. STM32 + chibios + libscpi + caffeine == controlling your project with scpi commands over serial and ethernet. Latest thingy is some simple PWM stuff for testing H-bridges. So setup duty cycle, frequency, ramps, triggers and all that over SCPI. And the "front panel" right now consists of a couple of knobs + buttons.
The part I don't like? The libscpi I use right now is very basic. But hey, for now it is almost good enough and doesn't have me looking
too often at writing my own lex + yacc or antlr based parser or whatever the cool kids use these days. That libscpi is still strncasecmp() galore, but MUST NOT THINK ABOUT IT. Black box. ohhhhhhmmmmmmmm.
Right now I simply echo commands to the serial port. Later I'll reuse a simple qt app from some time ago that did something very similar. As in you press a pretty button in the GUI, and it then sends the appropriate command over serial/ethernet. I have that working on linux and on android tablet for controlling a DDS module. Should also work on windoze, but I haven't checked that build for ages because who the hell cares. Life's too short for windoze builds.
All that to say that, yes, it's pretty doable to make your own control panel. But I will say that I am a bit ambivalent in that regard. Ideally a good scope UI will do all the things I need on the front panel with a minimum of button presses. I do NOT expect a scope like this (or a dedicated signal source for that matter) to have a full math toolbox for signal generation. That is something easier done on a dedicated PC. But the lack of 0-9 digits and nano-micro-milli buttons for quick entry of frequency and such, that is just silly. It probably is a space tradeoff, but still... And the lack of detent when selecting frequency also doesn't sound all that confidence inspiring either.
Something like that would indeed prompt me to make an app on the android where you enter the frequency, and then send SCPI command. And probably a couple of frequency presets and all that. I already have that in the DDS controller anyways, so copy/paste ftw.
Anyways, things that I noticed that could possibly do with some attention:
- timestamps for use with segmented memory
- creating waveforms using matlab/whatever and uploading it to the scope. Maybe something with pretty pixels, but I am not much of a GUI person. Command line tends to get the job done faster for me.
- related to segmented memory, downloading all the segments in one fast transfer instead of this slowpoke business of reading a segment into display memory and then readout display memory for each and every segment. Not sure if that is possible, but it's worth looking into. That will require some experimentation as the high quality docs are useless as authoritative source. I think of rigol programming docs more as a "collection of command suggestions that might even do something".
Oh yeah, related to timestamping the trigger ... does anyone know how shitty the jitter is on the trigger out on the DS1000Z? I think I read something like 2 ns jitter best case. So then since you know your instrument it would be 2 ns jitter. Which is pretty bad, but would still be useable for the purpose of knowing when a particular segment was.
The reason I ask ... I would like to be able to combine the DS1000 with my HP scope. Let the DS1000 do the triggering, and then use the trigger out as trigger source for the HP. Basically to combine the large memory of the DS1000 with the better single shot capability of the HP for when I need to look at some fast edges. Maybe this will be shit, maybe not, I don't know until I've tried it. The HP is nice, but the memory size is soooo 1990's.
As is the crt and the turbine engine fans.
The scope need an app for the signalgen to be used, I'm not using mine, for me this ui is totally useless.
It's actually not that hard to do if you want to play with SPCI. I think you can even do it over the network using telnet and without installing any software.
SCPI over telnet looks to be trivial indeed. I recall it being port 6666 but not 100% sure since I don't own one yet, so not committed to memory.