How to exit a 'Restart Capture' loop?

Hi

I'm fairly new to PicoScope. I purchased the unit (2206B) specifically for an application which requires 10 second data captures to be written to disk, then recommence another capture. This loop needs to continue until the operator determines it is time to stop.

In PicoScope 6 the Alarm I've defined to do this is as per the attachment.

It works well, except for a way for the operator to exit the alarm loop. Clicking on the 'Stop Button' icon in the bottom left of the display does not work. The only way I have been able to exit the loop is to select 'Off' under the probe voltage range setting drop down menu.

Any suggestions?

Hi Elecmuso,

There are really only 2 other ways that I know of stopping an auto-save loop (which is running to quickly to be reliably halted by just hitting Stop). In increasing order of effectiveness:

1/ Give the software something to do that will delay a save long enough for you to hit the stop button, e.g hit the Auto-Setup button in between appearances of the 'Saving' window, then immediately hit the Stop button (easier and more effective for cycles of 1 second or larger ).
2/ Disconnect the probe/lead from the channel that the PicoScope is triggering on, hit the Stop button, then reconnect.

Regards,

Gerry

Thanks Gerry

Hitting the auto setup button (the little lightning bolt) results in a much quicker data capture period (5mS @ 1MS instead of 10 seconds @ 1MS) and it becomes even harder to stop.

Just so you know I am trying to capture locomotive induced high voltage (up to 1kV / 50kHz) for the duration of an entire train (several minutes) which is why I am saving the data in 10 second chunks.

Removing the high voltage probe (physically) is also not really an option.

But at least I know there is no 'easy way' (which seems a bit of an omission in the software).

For me the best way seems to be to select Probe Off which stops acquisition, then I can use the Stop button Icon successfully.

Cheers

The "Space Bar" may work better than the Stop/Start button on screen.

Hi Elecmuso,

I didn't realize you were running in slow sampling (streaming) mode. This uses a different mechanism in terms of what happens after the file is saved (i.e. what restarts the next capture), because the driver restarts the next capture instead of the trigger, so using timing to stop the cycle won't work. You can actually break the cycle by rapid double clicking on Stop or the space bar, as Martin suggested (but this requires that the alarm is triggered on buffers full, rather than capture, which freezes the hardware) so, you're method is better.

Regards,

Gerry

Hi Elecmuso,

Just for completeness, there IS an easier way of doing this, which is to set the 'Alarm' to 'Save all buffers', on 'Buffers full', and set the 'Maximum Wave-forms' in the 'Waveform buffer' to 2 in 'Preferences', which will mean that you will be saving data every 2 wave-forms. Then you will be able to stop the capture as follows:

1. If the wave-form being captured is 1 of 1, press 'Stop' to stop the capture immediately (without any file save)
2. If the waveform being captured is 2 of 2, press 'Stop' to stop the capture with a save to file. Then, once the capture restarts for wave-form 1 of 1, press 'Stop' again to immediately stop the capture without any file save. (Note that you have to wait for the restart or the software will freeze, as I mentioned in my previous post).

Regards,

Gerry