EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Products => Test Equipment => Topic started by: evb149 on August 07, 2021, 09:20:21 pm
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Hi -- I'm running LINUX and I'm interested in finding out what sorts of
software -- both --
* keysight provided free for use with the scope and
* 3rd party / open source / whatever compatible tools that work via USB / ethernet / ...
... is available and recommended to work with the instrument.
I haven't looked at the keysight and 3rd party tools which work well on LINUX for these models before so
I'm looking for suggestions / options to expand on the obvious "yeah go to keysight.com and download their stuff".
In the most basic case of course simple functions like acquiring / downloading capture screen shots would be useful but hardly
necessary to use a software based tool for vs. a USB drive.
More interesting might be:
* data acquisition of series of measurement results per. trigger to a CSV / spreadsheet
* better UI to set up measurements and acquisition settings, save/restore setups, etc.
* some kind of easier data capture / export integration with analysis / data tools like Scilab, Octave, Jupyter, Numpy, etc.
* For protocol decoding a nice way to acquire, display, filter, scroll through protocol traces
* Better waveform viewing / zoom / scroll etc.
Is there a good UI for general manual operations control over ethernet or do you really have to use the VGA port to see
the scope UI well in comparison other than doing some labview / alternative SW UI?
Thanks!
Update: I consider this well answered by the kind replies which I've received below.
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glscopeclient might be exactly what you're looking for. It runs on Linux and Windows and provides a full remote control UI with protocol analysis/decoding. We've never tested it on MSO-X 4000 series IIRC but it works on MSO-X 2000 and 3000 so if the command set is the same it should mostly work (control of sample rate and depth will not work until someone adds the list of supported values for each model to the driver, which is straightforward).
Code: https://github.com/azonenberg/scopehal-apps/ (https://github.com/azonenberg/scopehal-apps/)
Slides from a talk I gave on it recently (video isn't posted yet): https://www.antikernel.net/temp/glscopeclient-intro.pdf (https://www.antikernel.net/temp/glscopeclient-intro.pdf)
Draft of manual: https://www.antikernel.net/temp/glscopeclient-manual.pdf (https://www.antikernel.net/temp/glscopeclient-manual.pdf)
If you have questions or problems you can reply here or hop in our chat channel (#scopehal on libera.chat IRC or the 1bitsquared Discord)
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If you point your browser at the scope's IP address, you can easily do things like screen captures, download traces in CSV and other formats, and manipulate controls with a virtual front panel. No extra SW is needed.
It's also not too difficult to "roll your own". I've written a few command line utilities to make specific things like screen captures and importing into Octave easier.
There's a programming guide which describes all the commands accessible over Ethernet:
https://www.keysight.com/us/en/assets/9018-06976/programming-guides/9018-06976.pdf (https://www.keysight.com/us/en/assets/9018-06976/programming-guides/9018-06976.pdf)
It's unfortunately a harder road using Linux with any recent Keysight equipment. I continue to hope that will change.
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The video from that talk is now available if you want to watch it (includes both my narration of the slides and a live demo / Q&A after):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0ckmC2RXi4 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0ckmC2RXi4)
Also, glscopeclient is built around two C++ libraries: libscopehal (abstracted API for instrument control) and libscopeprotocols (protocol decodes and math functions). Both are intended to be used by standalone signal-crunching code directly, as well as being used by glscopeclient.