Month: December 2013

Rigol oscilloscope waveform software

If you follow me on twitter, you may know that I have written an small application that  obtains the waveforms from the oscilloscope and plots it to an graph.

The orginal software and driver from Rigol did not work as it should, after trying several operating systems and computers, I gave up trying and decided on writing my own.

The Rigol oscilloscopes, and as far as I know, all of the other instruments support VISA. This means that the NI VISA driver set from National Instruments can be used as the interface between the program and the instrument, and we don’t have to worry about other than the high level communication.

Download the program here.

In order for the program to work, you need the NI-VISA:

Windows

MAC OS X

Linux (redhat/suse) 

On OSX and Linux, the program runs within MONO runtime.

scope1

Calibration: Set both inputs to GND and offset to 0V, read the waveform. If the graph is drawn in center of the screen, then all is ok, if not, save the CSV file, and experiment with the calibration value in order to get it in center.

Top of the screen = 25, bottom of the screen = 224 for my oscilloscope. This value is saved to an settings file and read when the program starts.

If neccesarry it should be possible to get the cal value read automaticaly from the scope.  In the future, I may implement Zedgraph for the graphing, but my experiences with it is a bit mixed.

The program is written in C# and the code is avaible here: https://github.com/la3pna/scope

First post

So this is my “new” blog, altough the domain have excisted for a while, I have not done any blog post yet. My former blog was on blogger.com, before they messed up, and the resulting mess ended up with no pictures, and posts with scrambled text. Most of the content was less interesting, so the relevant parts may end up in an post here.

In this blog I plan on sticking to RF (Radio Frequency) engineering, with some de-tours into other fields, mainly electronics.  I will try to write all my post in english, but there may appear some isolated posts in norwegian from time to time.   I have an goal to keep the blog free of any comercial avertizing. As of now, I’m not paid by any of the mentioned firms in my posts, if that changes, I will make sure to blog about it.

I’m considering getting an domain for this blog, but for now, I’l use wordpress as the publishing platform.