Series 1, Part 1: Our New PicoScope 3000E Series
I am absolutely over the moon with the performance of our new PicoScope 3000E Series! Today I had a chance to really get stuck in and take the scope for a drive.
Personally, I am most excited by three things in this new range:
- The super-fast 5 GS/s sample rate
- The ultra-deep 2G points of memory
- The lightning-quick USB 3.0 Type-C (with power delivery) connectivity and data transfer
It’s the perfect tool for a task at hand – analyzing and verifying the SPI bus on a board that I’m planning to start using very soon for on-site (and remote) demonstrations for our customers. Stay tuned to validate and gain confidence in an SPI clock running at 3 MHz on an Atmel SAMD20 microcontroller.
Series 1, Part 2: Validating an SPI Clock
My PicoScope 3418E has made validating the 3 MHz SPI clock on an Atmel SAMD20 an absolute breeze! Acquiring in 10-bit mode, I have 2.5 GS/s available on channel A, providing high confidence to accurately sample and reproduce the clock before running some measurements.
Below I have set up the scope to acquire 1000 separate buffers, each of them sampled at 2.5 GS/s across a total time base of 50 µs (5 µs/Div).
Using the DeepMeasure function in PicoScope 7, I can almost instantaneously run a wide range of measurements across all 1000 buffers to easily gain confidence in the amplitude and time domain characteristics of this signal. For example: in this application, the lowest frequency the clock sits at is 2.985 MHz and the highest is 3.0024 MHz.
Already, I have a high confidence that this clock signal is robust and fit for purpose and I haven’t even scratched the surface of the 2 GS available memory – 125 kS per buffer x 1000 buffers = 125 MS of 2 GS available.
Series 1, Part 3: Adding input/output and rapid trigger
Having validated the 3 MHz clock using my PicoScope 3418E, it’s now time to bring in the input and output waveforms, set up some triggering and continue to gain confidence in the SPI demo on my Microchip SAMD20 Mixed Signal board.
Alongside the clock, below I have captured the input and output data packets and set up a rapid trigger on the scope. This time, I’m using a 100 µs time base at 10 µs/Div, sampling at 625 MS/s, resulting in 62 500 samples per acquisition. Using Rapid Trigger mode, I have captured 4 000 of these acquisitions in just over 2.5 seconds. I’ve still only managed to use 250 million points of the 2 billion available though #MustTryHarder.
Lastly, I’ve configured two separate waveform views and overlaid the clock on the two data lines respectively. Browsing through the 4k buffers, I am happy that everything is behaving as it should and I’m really starting to enjoy this instrument.
Series 1, Part 4 (Final): Decoding & Exporting
Having validated the SCK, input & output waveforms, It’s about time we had some reward for our hard work and read off some serial data!
Below, I’ve used our serial decode wizard on the signals and PicoScope 7 has plotted a table for me with the data decoded all the way down to ASCII. It’s nice to see the results of the past few tasks in human-readable form and to confirm there are no errors. It’s even nicer to be able to export that work in a CSV file to send off to my Manager/Customer/Supplier/Colleague etc…
I hope the last 4 episodes have shown how great the new PicoScope 3000E Series is (even if our jokes are terrible).
For more information on the PicoScope 3000E click here.