picoscope on ubuntu 16.04

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mike gill
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Joined: Tue Jan 16, 2018 7:06 pm

picoscope on ubuntu 16.04

Post by mike gill »

These comments apply to 3406D with PicoScope6-6.12.9.35 on ubuntu 16.04 64 ( new Intel NUC i5, if it matters )

Picoscope is a great idea and highly convenient to carry around, but falls a long way short of the user interaction available with modern conventional scopes with control knobs and touchscreens. (Thinking about it, it would not be so hard devising an auxiliary usb control with a few incremental encoders and buttons.)

The reason for mentioning hardware above is that the the wireless mouse and keyboard become dysfunctional after an hour or two. This happens with different mouse & keyboard sets, but only if picoscope is in use. It takes un/re-plugging the wireless dongle to recover.

There have been some lock-ups but generally not an issue.

Numeric control widgets are bad. Logarithmic control is sort-of ok for covering big ranges, but generally useless for fine adjustment. How about displaying the full available numeric resolution, and cursor-selecting the digit to be controlled with the up/down buttons, maybe linked with repeat acceleration and a few other smarts? Even I could do you a demo of this.

I've just had bad experience with the waveform generator, trying to control frequency over a narrow range - I had to give up and revert to my Keysight scope.

I think there must be plain bugs in the numeric controls - the waveform generator refuses to accept finer than 100Hz resolution at around 500KHz, output offset and amplitude limits at 1V (I know there is a 2V max total)

The vertical resolution enhancement system is hard to understand, and seems to change unpredictably. Sometimes it introduces "slew rate" behaviour and sometimes not, under the same settings, and does not seem to respond to sample rate.

mike

Hitesh

Re: picoscope on ubuntu 16.04

Post by Hitesh »

Hi Mike,

Thank you for your feedback. The Development Team have been working on changes to the GUI which will appear in the next major release and I will pass on your comments.

Referring to the issue with the wireless USB keyboard and mouse, are you able to connect the PicoScope to a different USB root hub on the NUC or use a powered USB hub? What settings are you using in the PicoScope software over the course of the hour?

Do you have any psdata files showing the issues with the resolution enhancement feature?

Regards,

OldIron
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Posts: 0
Joined: Thu May 22, 2014 7:04 am

Re: picoscope on ubuntu 16.04

Post by OldIron »

Hi Mike,

1. Wireless mouse and keyboard
In my laboratory I use PC scope confguration that includes PicoScope 5242B and PS6 v.6.12.9.2917 Windows10 on desktop PC. I use Logitech wireless mouse & keyboard set + Unified Receiver. No incidents like yours have ocurred so far.

2. Output voltage range ±2 V.
This is a total range - includes both ±1V AC signal and ±1V offset.

3. Frequency resolution of the Signal Generator
Similar results as yours. When I typed 100.46kHz in Start Frequency field of Signal Generator dialog it was rounded to 100.5kHz.
However it turned out that the Signal Generator accepted the typed 100.46kHz frequency. I checked that by precise frequency counter. Tests at lower frequencies proved 50mHz resolution. The rounding to 100.5kHz was only in the user interface of PS6.
I hope the software designers at Pico Technology can easily address this issue - to make the Signal Generator dialog show the keyed in frequency with more than 4 digits, when required.
Old Iron

Hitesh

Re: picoscope on ubuntu 16.04

Post by Hitesh »

Hi OldIron,

Thank you for your feedback. I have notified the Development Team about the request for additional digits when specifying the signal generator frequency.

Regards,

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