Frequency Response Analyzer with Bode Plots

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PicoTom
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Re: Frequency Response Analyzer with Bode Plots

Post by PicoTom »

Hi Aaron,

thank you very much for this answer. This solved my problem.
That the measurement takes more time now, is not so important.

Have a nice evening.
Tom

springburo
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Re: Frequency Response Analyzer with Bode Plots

Post by springburo »

Dear Aron, it looks really good and thank you for creating the FRA. I am using windows with 64bit and get an error message, saying error in compilation the software needs to be updates for 64bit systems and the declarations should be marked with a "PTRsafe attribute". Is there a simple solution ?

hexamer
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Re: Frequency Response Analyzer with Bode Plots

Post by hexamer »

springburo wrote:Dear Aron, it looks really good and thank you for creating the FRA. I am using windows with 64bit and get an error message, saying error in compilation the software needs to be updates for 64bit systems and the declarations should be marked with a "PTRsafe attribute". Is there a simple solution ?
Thank you for reporting back. I'll investigate. I'm testing on 64 bit windows 7 and 10, so I'm not immediately sure what could be going wrong. Please also tell me what version of Windows and MS Office you are using.

gurk
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Range of the Frequency Response Analyzer with Bode Plots

Post by gurk »

Dear Aron, your Frequency Response tool make our master students happy. Nevertheless, using our 2205A picoscoe the SW is limited in the frequency range. We would like to study Bode plots up to 1 or 10 Mhz. Is the frequency limitation a software issue or do we need to buy a new picoscope with higher sampling rate?

Greetings from Cologne

Marcus

Martyn
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Re: Frequency Response Analyzer with Bode Plots

Post by Martyn »

This will be a hardware limitation, the 2205A only has a 100kHz signal generator, you would need to use one of the higher spec devices with a 1MHz or 20MHz generator.
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hexamer
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Re: Frequency Response Analyzer with Bode Plots

Post by hexamer »

hexamer wrote:
springburo wrote:Dear Aron, it looks really good and thank you for creating the FRA. I am using windows with 64bit and get an error message, saying error in compilation the software needs to be updates for 64bit systems and the declarations should be marked with a "PTRsafe attribute". Is there a simple solution ?
Thank you for reporting back. I'll investigate. I'm testing on 64 bit windows 7 and 10, so I'm not immediately sure what could be going wrong. Please also tell me what version of Windows and MS Office you are using.
After researching those terms, I have some thoughts. I'm away from my PC now so I can't confirm, but I think there's a good chance my Office installations are all 32 bit versions. I can look into making a 64 bit version of the DLLs. In the meantime, if you can tolerate switching to 32 bit Office you'll probably have more success. MS even recommends that you use the 32 bit version for better compatibility unless you have a specific reason to use the 64 bit version.

nano
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Re: Frequency Response Analyzer with Bode Plots

Post by nano »

Hello Aaron,

I am very exited about my brand new PS5444B.

But apparently it is not working with FRA4Picoscope 0.5.5b. (and 0.5.4) Measurement Progreass is very very slow (minutes fro 3 steps). Looking at the debug waveforms tells me, that actually nohting is measured.

BTW I have another feature request: if the channel data would be available separately, impedance measurements for passive components would be possible via an external test-fixture. Any comments?

Thanks a lot for your support.

nano
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Re: Frequency Response Analyzer with Bode Plots

Post by nano »

Dear Aaron, I am just playing around with FRA4PicoScope 0.5.5b and my brand new PS5444B and I am facing some problems. The measurement takes very very long. About 2 minutes for 3 steps. Further, looking at the time domain waveforms i can actually see that nothing is sampled. I can confirm that the test-setup is absolutely OK, since my PS2205A works as usual. Then I installed 0.4b and it works! Super fast, and just like expected (i am currently working with a passive RLC-Lowpass Filter). Now, switching back to 0.5.5b, the same result as before (fail).

Any Ideas?

hexamer
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Re: Frequency Response Analyzer with Bode Plots

Post by hexamer »

nano wrote:Dear Aaron, I am just playing around with FRA4PicoScope 0.5.5b and my brand new PS5444B and I am facing some problems. The measurement takes very very long. About 2 minutes for 3 steps. Further, looking at the time domain waveforms i can actually see that nothing is sampled. I can confirm that the test-setup is absolutely OK, since my PS2205A works as usual. Then I installed 0.4b and it works! Super fast, and just like expected (i am currently working with a passive RLC-Lowpass Filter). Now, switching back to 0.5.5b, the same result as before (fail).

Any Ideas?
That is definitely strange and new to me. I use a 5444A where the only difference should be amount of buffer memory.

For the failure case, could you send me the two configuration files (one for the app and one for the scope), and a copy of the log? I doubt the circuit matters, but any additional details there might help too.

Martyn
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Re: Frequency Response Analyzer with Bode Plots

Post by Martyn »

Which version of the Pico SDK do you have installed ? 32bit/64bit/both
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nano
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Re: Frequency Response Analyzer with Bode Plots

Post by nano »

Oh, sorry for the double-post. Was doing a lot of things in parallel yesterday evening....

Anyway, at the moment I am compiling the requested debug-data. -> done, see attachment

I have installed the 64bit SDK, running on a 64bit win7 machine (lenovo x201).
Attachments
20161201_fra4pico_debug.zip
log, settings and screenshots for PS5444B and FRA4PicoScope 0.4b and 0.5.5b.
(255.95 KiB) Downloaded 250 times

hexamer
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Re: Frequency Response Analyzer with Bode Plots

Post by hexamer »

nano wrote:Oh, sorry for the double-post. Was doing a lot of things in parallel yesterday evening....

Anyway, at the moment I am compiling the requested debug-data. -> done, see attachment

I have installed the 64bit SDK, running on a 64bit win7 machine (lenovo x201).
Thank you for following up. I appreciate the effort collecting the diagnostics. Unfortunately, I didn't see anything tell-tale in those files, which is why ...
Martyn wrote:Which version of the Pico SDK do you have installed ? 32bit/64bit/both
I'm glad Martyn remembered to ask this. Your symptoms seem somewhat related to this discussion: topic14311-90.html#p74481

Though I'm not quite sure why it would still work fine on your PS2205A. Maybe somehow you do have 32 bit drivers installed for that scope?

In any case, the application is currently only available as 32-bit, so it requires the 32 bit drivers. Please install them and try again.

Assuming that's the issue, the disturbing thing is that I thought I fixed this problem in 0.5.4b. The application requires minimum DLL versions, otherwise it will warn you that it may fail (though you can ignore it and proceed). Did you get any warning of that type? Perhaps I need to add special handling for 64 bit DLLs - I'd need to research to find out how the application even loads when only 64 bit DLLs are present.

nano
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Re: Frequency Response Analyzer with Bode Plots

Post by nano »

I installed the 32bit SDK this morning (side by side with the 64bit SDK).
# Now the PS5444B works just fine, problem solved.
# PS2205A works too.
One really should read the manual :oops:

How can I set the vertical resolution for the PS5444B? What is default (8bit)?
Is it possible to access the channel raw data? I'd love to try something like this:
http://www.marucchi.it/ZRLC_web/ZRLC/St ... Bridge.pdf
with the additional bandwidth and precision of the PicoSope.

BTW The work with your API is still in progress. Currently i am reconfiguring my python-environment.

hexamer
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Re: Frequency Response Analyzer with Bode Plots

Post by hexamer »

nano wrote:I installed the 32bit SDK this morning (side by side with the 64bit SDK).
# Now the PS5444B works just fine, problem solved.
# PS2205A works too.
One really should read the manual :oops:
I'm actually happy you found this. It means I need to do more work to detect incompatible DLLs. Thanks also to Martyn for saving me debugging time!
nano wrote: How can I set the vertical resolution for the PS5444B? What is default (8bit)?
For variable resolution scopes (5000a series), the program always uses the highest available resolution for 2 channels, which is 15 bits.
nano wrote: Is it possible to access the channel raw data? I'd love to try something like this:
http://www.marucchi.it/ZRLC_web/ZRLC/St ... Bridge.pdf
with the additional bandwidth and precision of the PicoSope.
Probably wouldn't be too much effort to also export the raw data while in time-domain diagnostics mode. But honestly that seems outside the scope of the FRA application. My brief read of that paper seems into indicate the method only requires one frequency. If that's correct, then you can probably also get raw data just as easily using the PicoScope application (File -> Save As). It would be interesting to know how that method compares to FRA for impedance measurements.
nano wrote: BTW The work with your API is still in progress. Currently i am reconfiguring my python-environment.
Thanks for the continued interest!

hexamer
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Re: Frequency Response Analyzer with Bode Plots

Post by hexamer »

Nano,

I just want to follow up on this thought ...
hexamer wrote: Though I'm not quite sure why it would still work fine on your PS2205A. Maybe somehow you do have 32 bit drivers installed for that scope?
Any chance you had the PicoLog software installed?

Also, I assume you do (did) have the PicoScope software installed, right :)

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