A big thank you and shout-out to Kikusui Electronics Corporation who has sponsored one of their latest generation compact DC power supplies, the
PMX35-3A, to support the continued development of the open source lxi-tools project
I hooked it up to power one of my embedded Linux development boards and connected it to the network after which it was easily discovered with lxi-tools.
This is a really nice and compact DC power supply but what makes it particular interesting for the lxi-tools project, besides being fully LXI compliant, is the fact that it features the new HiSlip communication protocol and mDNS/DNS-SD service discovery. This device is going to be very helpful and instrumental in the effort to bring HiSlip and mDNS discovery features to lxi-tools.
In fact, testing with the PMX35-3A revealed the already implemented lxi-tools mDNS discovery feature to be broken. After further testing and debug this has been fixed and the mDNS discover feature now works perfectly fine:
Also, as is evident from the screenshot above, the PMX is an absolute screaming performance beast when it comes to VXI-11 and RAW communication speed!
With ~1600 requests/second for VXI-11 and as high as ~3700 requests/second for RAW - this is like nothing I have ever seen before - good work Kikusui!
After fixing the mDNS discover feature I started playing with the PMX device in combination with lxi-gui to test and refine the new data recorder feature. The end result is demonstrated in this youtube video:
https://youtu.be/QPgAGEImD0UNotice that the data recorder now automatically scales the chart axes and supports saving sample data to CSV for later import in e.g. Libreoffice Calc.
The command line lxi tool has been stable for a while and the new lxi-gui is now also getting in pretty good shape with all the basic features working. Next, focus is going to be on implementing an open source HiSlip library and armed with the Kikusui PMX35-3A we will now have a faster path to test and make sure the HiSlip implementation is correct