General > General Technical Chat
The Rigol DS1052E
<< < (40/166) > >>
macpod:
I noticed the DS1052E has an option MemDepth which lets you set the device to Normal (16K/8K) or Long Mem (1M/512K).

I could understand having this setting so you could save more waveforms on the device, but is there another benefit to having this setting that I am overlooking?

Brett:
I just bought 3 Rigol DS1052E's in addition to the one I already have.  Some of you have purchased yours through my seller as well, and my boss is getting one now too.  Of the three, one was for my buddy and two were for work.  Everyone loves them.  These are the perfect little scopes for the lab and travel.

One bug I found recently is if you try to save a file with an underscore before it '_', it locks up the firmware.  Power cycling restores it, but beware!

BTW: The price I got on the 3 scope bundle was $407 each shipped.  Single scopes are regularly going out as $420 shipped.  I also had no problems with US Customs on the larger 3 scope package.

Enjoy these pictures:




Brett:

--- Quote from: macpod on March 05, 2010, 04:36:16 pm ---I noticed the DS1052E has an option MemDepth which lets you set the device to Normal (16K/8K) or Long Mem (1M/512K).

I could understand having this setting so you could save more waveforms on the device, but is there another benefit to having this setting that I am overlooking?

--- End quote ---

The real benefit is that if you REALLY need to over sample at a relatively slow timebase (10s or 100s of milliseconds), you can with the Long Mem.  The downside to Long Mem, is that if you try to save it to USB drive, it takes quite a while to do so.  WHen I first used it, I thought the scope had locked up.  Later I learned to take 5-10 minute breaks after pressing the save button, as it creates a >20MB CSV file.

If you are saving some analog waveform, and there are not a lot of fast transitions... setting the memory depth to Normal is plenty sufficient.

If you are on the other hand trying to capture 5 minutes worth of I²C or SPI data, then by all means turn on the Long Mem.  Analyzing and graphing 800K+ points of data is another problem you will have, but it's there if you need it.

The Normal mode is going to be your bet bet overall, and for analog waveforms I wouldn't even bother with the CSV output.  Just save as BMP and make sure you have the waveform positioned by of a pair of major grid axis to be able to gauge amplitude and duration accurately.  I thought the CSV with analog waveforms would help me create some more detailed EXCEL graphs.  Well Excel only graphs 32000 points at a time, and because there is not a lot of precision in the A/D samples, you end up with a lot of the same numbers in your graph, and the end result is a nice stair-stepped waveform (instead of a smooth line).  There is probably a way to filter the data better to integrate and smooth things out, but I've yet to work on that one.
joelby:
Try saving it as a WFM file. It is a binary format, so it is much more compact and much quicker to save to flash than CSV.

Apparently the software that comes with the scope might process them, but I haven't bothered. Just use the Matlab script to do it: http://www.mathworks.com.au/matlabcentral/fileexchange/18999-read-binary-rigol-waveforms . It will probably also work in the free Matlab-alike, Octave, or you could examine the code and write a WFM to CSV conversion tool pretty easily. Something like gnuplot will probably have more success than Excel with plotting many points.
Brett:
Cool, thanks Joel!

EDIT: As an alternative, if you don't want to download Octave and get it all set up, here is a little utility based on the readRigolWaveform.m function to decode WMF files:
http://qt.tn.tudelft.nl/~gsteele/rigol2dat/
Navigation
Message Index
Next page
Previous page
There was an error while thanking
Thanking...

Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod