No Trigger Holdoff - A note to management

[iomos]

Lack of trigger hold-off is a well known issue to many frustrated PicoScope customers, like myself.

It has been politely requested countless times over many years.
PicoScope is THE ONLY oscilloscope lacking this feature. Even the cheapest Chinese alternatives on the market have it.

PicoTech management, this is EMBARRASSING.

Either advertise lack of this feature clearly, or GIVE THIS FEATURE MAXIMUM PRIORITY. The reasons are explained in other threads.

Bragging about deep memory and advanced trigger options is pointless, without trigger hold-off.

This feature is just a timer. A junior engineer would need a few minutes to code it, using a haldfull of bytes in software or minimal resources in an FPGA. There is NO EXCUSE to not have it.

Save yourself some time, sales and money, and consider showing some respect to your customers.

Do something about it. It is already late.

[jasonRF]

I completely agree on this one so want to add my vote. It does steer some potential customers away.

Sometimes it feels like Picotech allows software engineers that are not fluent in the practical use of oscillosopces to make all of the decisions about what features to include in Picoscopes. I love my picoscope, but my next scope will be something different. It would be nice to have a scope with the 'normal' features that every other scope manufacturer on the planet knows are important, but Picotech seems to think are not worth bothering with.

I have been using the feedback on the new Picoscope7 release, and am hoping Picotech will surprise us.

jason

[Martyn]

Thank you for your feedback, it helps to stimulate conversations between both the software and hardware development teams, as well as management, and makes for a lively start to the week. We are looking at Trigger Hold Off, however due to the number of devices the software supports and the availability of FPGA space on these it is not a simple feature to add.

An alternative approach that can work for a number of cases is the use of a Pulse Width Trigger. If you open up the PicoScope software, connect the signal generator to Channel A, and then load the attached psdata file you will see a typical scenario of a signal that will trigger on any rising edge.

Now open up the trigger menu and you will see we have configured a Pulse Width Trigger with Time 1, the pulse width, set to 10usecs. Increase this to 20 usecs and the trace starts to clean up a bit as some of the rising edges no longer meet the trigger condition. Increase this further and when you reach 60 usecs you will see the trace stabilise.

Hopefully this will help a few of users requesting a trigger hold off.

[Willem43]

Hi Martin,

As suggested, I am using the Pulse Width Trigger to trigger my I2C and SPI bursts quite successfully.

There is, however, a problem with the advanced trigger options when using digital signals. With any analog channel enabled all the advanced trigger options, like the above Pulse Width Trigger, are available and works fine with both analog an digital channels (for digital at least the non-window options - as expected). As soon as all analog channels are turned off, only the simple and digital trigger options are available and I can no longer select the Pulse Width Trigger option. I think this is an oversight?

We are talking PicoScope 7.

[Martyn]

The other trigger options should be available when the analogue channels are off, this bug is on the list to be fixed.

[Willem43]

@Martin. Thanks for the confirmation.