Picoscope 6404D Acquisition Time

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nwford
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Joined: Tue Oct 09, 2018 10:14 pm

Picoscope 6404D Acquisition Time

Post by nwford »

I have a Picoscope 6404D. I am using it to acquire a trace of 50uS in length. I am triggering it off of another channel and then averaging it over a long period of time. My question is how quickly can I acquire these traces? Obviously I could acquire 1,000s of traces of length 50uS in one second if the scope was fast enough, but using the Picoscope 6 Software it seems I am limited to only 10 or so traces at most in a second. Is this a limitation of the Picoscope Software? Can I have to scope acquire a bunch of singles, store it in the on-board memory, and then transfer the data over to the computer as it sees fit? Would this require some external software to do?

Another thing is when using the Repeat Triggering mode, is there a way to tell it to only acquire a certain number of sample and then stop?

Gerry
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Re: Picoscope 6404D Acquisition Time

Post by Gerry »

Hi nwford,

To answer your questions, yes you can have the scope acquire a number of traces at once and then transfer them to the PC over USB, using Rapid Trigger Mode (see the red circle in the Screenshot below). Using this mode the delay between traces is of the order of 1 microsecond of less. When transferring the data over USB there is a typical delay of the order of 10's of microseconds for the USB bus to be available, and then there is the transfer time of the data to the computer, the rest of the time (delimited by approximately 1us to re-arm the trigger) will be available for capturing waveforms.
Rapid Triggering.png

In Rapid Trigger Mode you can specify the number of waveforms to capture (as shown by the green circle).

Regards,

Gerry
Gerry
Technical Specialist

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