Visashot Addon: Colorize your 8590E series screenshots like it was 2010

[hp3310a]

First and foremost: The following would not be possible without VISASHOT a great tool for taking screenshots from "vintage" instruments.

Since I have an LCD in my 8591E spectrum analyzer, it was bugging me that screenshots looked less cool than the real thing. Screenshots have one color and look like 1995 all-CRT. The LCD has 2 colors, the trace is white (other options available), surroundings are green. MUCH better.

To fix that, I wrote this little script that takes a screenshot and colorizes it (attached below). I though it might be interesting to others using these spectrum analyzers. Using the default setup you get this:



With custom colors you can get this:



The possibilities are endless. It even works in 2-window mode:



In theory it would make sense to integrate this into VISASHOT, but I didn't do it because (at the moment) it works only with the screen arrangement of the 8590E series spectrum analyzers.

[bateau020]

3 remarks:
1) it will have done a new sweep, so it will not work for dumping data you got via more complex situations, like manual sweeps or single shot/paused gated sweeps.
2) after the screenshot is done, it will have removed any info that was printed as extra on screen. Example: Config/Show Options and do a screenshot. The options will be visible in the screenshot, but will become invisible on screen afterwards (but the menu still thinks they are displayed). Or try with "Display Cal data".

Now I understand why this happens, so to make the script more versatile, it would be nice to add a command line option "keep screen as is", admittedly sacrificing coloring in that case.

3) on my installation (python 3.14.2, PyVISA==1.16.1, PyVISA-py==0.8.1), I need to either remove the line "inst.close()" or change it into "rm.close()"