HP 16700 LA Offline trace viewer

[PaulAm]

I recently completed a reverse engineering project where I had to end up using my HP16702 to capture various traces.  As you know, the instrument is a bit loud, even after replacing the fans, and is a little slow.  So I wanted an application, somewhat similar to the waveform window that would display the traces and allow for search and measurement on my workstation.  Yes, I know Keysight has such a tool, but it's for Windows and I really don't like junking up my systems with that stuff.

The LA allows the data to be exported in an ascii format.  I had to do that anyway for my analysis so I used that and had Claude Sonnet 5 build me a lightweight waveform viewer with search, zoom and some editing capabilities.  The whole things is written in python/tkinter so will run on just about any system with python-3.  Turned out to be a very useful tool.  It would have taken me a week to write it and Claude did it in 20 minutes.  One of the really impressive things it did is the display response is only based on the size of the display window.  Handling a file with 20M data points is just about as fast as one with a few thousand.  The trade off is a little processing time up front, but it worked out really well.

I'm still tinkering with some stuff around the edges, but if there's any interest, I'll post the program here.  At the moment it's around 1800 lines of python

[petemate]

Cool stuff - I get happy every time someone posts about the 16700 series.

The usefullnes of an external viewer depends on the abstraction level you want, anyway. Once you look at something more than a few lines, the waveform viewer becomes irrelevant and you'd basically use the listing window, which is equal to just opening a text file, anyway.

Whats the keysight tool you are referring to? Also, have you considered making a driver for ngscopeclient? Thats the way I would go if I needed a waveform viewer.

[PaulAm]

ngscopeclient is really slick, I wasn't aware of that, but none of my equipment is compatible anyway.

Here's a screen shot showing a memory cycle I was working on.  Looking at a visual helps me a lot.

[petemate]

Cool stuff! I'd be interested in seeing the program, just to get at better understanding of gui programming.