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| Micsig Tablet Oscilloscope tBook mini TO1104 review (100Mhz 4 channel 'scope) |
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| alm:
I also recall 1000baseT phys to use a lot more power than 100baseTX phys. That would be an additional consideration for a device that can be battery-powered. I am actually positively surprised they did not include gigabit Ethernet. Putting gigabit Ethernet on a device that does not need it is the typical big, fancy features over functionality that I have come to expect from the Chinese test equipment designers. |
| lukier:
--- Quote from: exe on July 25, 2017, 07:25:26 pm ---What's the use case for this scope requiring 1Gbps link? I'd be worried about 256Mb ram... --- End quote --- Yup, another 256 MB is just few $. --- Quote from: alm on July 25, 2017, 10:17:45 pm ---I also recall 1000baseT phys to use a lot more power than 100baseTX phys. That would be an additional consideration for a device that can be battery-powered. --- End quote --- Hmm, good point. It seems Gigabit PHY requires four times more power. But I doubt it would be a common scenario to run on the battery while attached to the Ethernet. --- Quote from: alm on July 25, 2017, 10:17:45 pm ---I am actually positively surprised they did not include gigabit Ethernet. Putting gigabit Ethernet on a device that does not need it is the typical big, fancy features over functionality that I have come to expect from the Chinese test equipment designers. --- End quote --- My point is that the SoC is already fairly decent and with few extra $ here and there the functionality of the device could be extended with software. More complex on board waveform analysis (quad core is there, just space in RAM for buffers), live data streaming (GbE) like a DAQ/Digitizer etc. Look how rarely there is display output (on low-end scopes) somehow and Micsig did the right thing when they've decided it is worth it to spend a dollar or so on the micro-HDMI connector and some misc components - nice touch almost for free. Here one could also argue that HDMI peripheral block and LVDS transmitters consume so and so mW more. Luckily, there is the USB host port (alas not 3.0), so one could enable support for various USB accessories. I've mentioned serial terminal app with FTDI dongles somewhere here before - I could see that useful in the field. Another possibility is a semi-MSO functionality - low cost USB logic analyzer with trigger in and out BNCs that would connect to the Aux output and one of the channels. LeCroy did something similar for their early non-MSO scopes, it was called MS-32. Apparently, it wasn't great but mostly because of buggy design by the 3rd party, not by the afterthought-like nature of the device. |
| exe:
Here we come to the fundamental problem: there is simply not enough Micsig resources to implement all these features. Especially considering the price of the unit. I think, only with the help of community it is possible to deliver such a rich functionality you mentioned (although, some features are fairly easy to implement). So, I offered my help to Micsig to implement a better remote control not requiring Windows and NI-VISA (I'm on Linux, but even on Windows I'd hesitate installing such a big package), but they politely rejected. Too bad :(. Meanwhile I'm still trying to get telnet access and try to add more features unofficially. But no luck so far :(. PS I hope NI-VISA uses standard protocol. This way I still can try to implement own remote control and measurement program. Or even a web-server to access the scope from any browser. |
| alm:
I do not know the connection string they use for VISA, but I imagine it is just LXI (based on VXI-11). If they were just using sockets, then NI-VISA seems like a complicated way to do that. So connecting with something like python-vxi11 might be possible over Ethernet. Getting the correct commands may be a different matter. They may or may not be SCPI compatible. Sniffing the traffic with the original software might give some insight into this. Did anyone try to send *IDN? via VXI-11? |
| nctnico:
I tried some port sniffing but TO1000 doesn't seem to support LXI (plain text over telnet) which makes it extremely hard to control the TO1000 over the network. To me it is useless if I need NI VISA. Why the hell are manufacturs still using VXI? Even Siglent switched to LXI on most of their test equipment :-// |
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