Any hope of autosaving captured events to disk in Linux?

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bboyes
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Any hope of autosaving captured events to disk in Linux?

Post by bboyes »

HI, we have an application need to wait unattended for very infrequent (hours, days, or weeks, at least) electrical events, trigger on them, and capture and log to disk analog channels to a file with a timestamp.

Then when the next event happens, repeat to a new file. All automatically and unattended. This process might have to go on for many weeks, in a remote location not easily accessed. The data can be spooled off to the cloud (via cellular modem tether) where we can monitor it from our office.

We'd like to sample for at least 5 60 Hz cycles so 10 divisions of 20 msec per division should be more than enough per event. That looks possible with PicoScope. And there are a couple of differential 4-channel models which would be ideal. We are looking for mains power and mains ground disturbances so we only need a sampling rate of 100 KHz or better. These are not high speed events.

Capture events until the PC runs out of disk space: Ideally using Ubuntu 18.04. Since it needs to run for days or weeks, Ubuntu is much better suited than Windows, since we can't hold off the ^&** windows updates for more than a short time, and then Windows might autorestart which would kill the whole idea. So unless there is some way I can't find to get Windows10 to run and ignore all updates for weeks, it is unsuited to this task. The captures will be saved to a folder which auto-copies the Google cloud using Insync (that part is tested and works fine).

If we could use Raspberry Pi 3B+ as the remote host of the PicoScope that would be great... but to start a PC is fine. It just has to run 24/7 unattended, reliably for weeks.

I have the PicoScope 6 Beta 6.13.7.707 installed under Ubuntu 18.04 on a Lenovo Thinkpad bought for this purpose, and I am reading the manuals for the software and hardware but I am not sure how to save captures to disk automatically. This would seem such a common requirement that I must be missing how to do it. Now after some more googling it appears something called "alarms" in Windows can do this but that menu seems not available in Linux. I'd like to not be forced to write custom software right off the bat if possible.

Urk! What might be the solution? Is PicoScope not suited to such a use? Thank you in advance.

Martyn
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Re: Any hope of autosaving captured events to disk in Linux?

Post by Martyn »

This is only possible using the alarms feature, which is not available in the Linux version of the software, or by writing an application using the SDK. Sorry.
Martyn
Technical Support Manager

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