Industrial Machine Troubleshooting

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broncosaurs
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Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2018 3:14 pm

Industrial Machine Troubleshooting

Post by broncosaurs »

I need a scope to capture signal glitches in industrial machines.

I would like to have one or two inputs as triggers to save data including history. Example, a 10dc signal drops below 5v: write to a file the 5 seconds before the 5v trigger and 10 seconds after the trigger for this analog channel, 2 other analog channels and 4 digital channels . Voltages from 0-30dc, 0-240vac, analog and digital.

Able to troubleshoot RS485 coms.
Scope a 240v SSR (solid state relay) waveform.

Automotive pico maybe gives more protection? Please give your recommendations.

Gerry
PICO STAFF
PICO STAFF
Posts: 1145
Joined: Mon Aug 11, 2014 11:14 am

Re: Industrial Machine Troubleshooting

Post by Gerry »

Hi broncosaurs,

What you need then, is a 4 channel PicoScope that can perform a logic trigger on those channels (i.e. respond to an event on channels A, B, or C), capture data from analog and digital channels, with pre-trigger data, at potentially hazardous voltages, which can be written to a file. Our PicoScope 6 software, hardware PicoScopes, and Active differential Probes (see here: https://www.picotech.com/accessories/hi ... tial-probe) would enable you to do this.

However capturing digital channels at 240V AC would not really have a corresponding safe method of capture, so stepping down the voltage for digital channels would be preferred. Also, our probes from our range of Active differential Probes have an absolute maximum bandwidth of 100 MHz, so if you need to be capturing potentially hazardous signals at a faster rate you may need to look for alternative, suitably CAT rated, higher voltage, differential Probes, or use an alternative method for stepping down the voltage.

For TIA/RIA-485 (RS-485) analysis you would need a PicoScope with at least 10x the data rate that you will be looking at (preferably 25x if you are want to perform some signal integrity analysis and are not specifically looking at edge rates). As I understand it, the maximum data rates are up to 10 Mb/s (depending upon the encoding scheme used for the data, e.g. 8/10-bit encoding will be 12.5 Mbit/s), so if you want to be able to decode all transmissions without knowing in advance what rates they will be then, for instance, you would need something like a PicoScope 3206D MSO (see here: https://www.picotech.com/oscilloscope/3 ... c-analyzer).

Regards,

Gerry
Gerry
Technical Specialist

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