Choosing a USB oscilloscope to automate measurement & North American FAE

Which product is right for your exact requirements
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madninjanamb
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Choosing a USB oscilloscope to automate measurement & North American FAE

Post by madninjanamb »

HI,

I work in a company as a hardware development engineer from west coast United states. I am using my personal email address here to post a question due to security reason on a public forum.

I am looking for setting up an automated measurement of few PWM signals (few hundreds of Khz signal to monitor) using passive probes. I would like to write the script to automate the process of capturing the waveforms and use math functions to measure the duty cycle, frequency, amplitude etc of the captured signal from a laptop. I would like to automate as much as possible since we are looking for building multiple systems for testing. My preference is to use python scripts to automate.

I am new to pico or any usb oscilloscopes. From hardware specification list pico 3000 series seems more than enough for our application. However, I have few questions on purchasing and selection of the scope.


1. Do pico support python based scripts and have python library for automating the measurements? I saw matlab, c, c++, C#, labview SDK from website, did not see specifically for python. I am curious pico have something python based. If yes could you share documentation for python based methods for Pico 3000 series.

2. Which is the most recommended and popular automating platform for pico scopes (3000 series) from your end? Matlab, labview, c++, python etc. (though we prefer python, if pico recommends some other platform as it is more evolved, we are open to consider using it).

3. From tech specs, pico 2000 series also good fit our requirement. Also the foam factor of pico2000 is very attractive. However, I did not find a SDK support for pico2000 series. Could we write scripts to automate measurements on Pico2000 series? or 2000 series does not have advanced automation capabilities?

4. Is pico3000 (or pico2000 series) a good choice for this application? The signals I am going to measure is relatively slow, (few 100s of Khz square wave and we are only interested in finding basic duty cycle, frequency, amplitude, note more than 2 channels etc)? Given my requirement to automate the measurement and the waveform specs, please suggest the best model number and lead time.

4. Can I get a Field application engineer contact email who is supporting united states west coast? I prefer to send email from my work email and have a tech discussion over my work email.


Thankyou! I appreciate a quick response.

Regards
madninjanamb

bennog
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Re: Choosing a USB oscilloscope to automate measurement & North American FAE

Post by bennog »

Pico themselves has to answer about the pico contact.

Few questions.
1. few hundreds kHz is rather wide range can you be more specific.
2. If you want more than 2 channels use a USB3 scope with a lot of memory.
3. How accurate do you want to measure the PWM values.
4. Do you need to measure them all the time or is a period of 5 ms every couple of seconds ok.
5. For the amplitude how accurate do you want to measure the amplitude.

for example if you want to measure the PWM value at a 5% tolerance on a single pwm pulse, then you need about 40 times the sample frequency of the frequency of the PWM signal.
You can reduce this number significantly if you can average the PWM measurement over a longer period you can get away with 5 - 10 times the PWM frequency.

For the amplitude the 2000 and 3000 scopes are 8 bit, so on a +/- 2V range you have about 200 different sample results over the complete range (and the LSB samples are rather noisy) , again you can improve the accuracy by averaging the values over a multiple waves.


Benno

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