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:
On OSX and Linux, the program runs within MONO runtime.
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
RF and electronics blog LA3PNA 