Any way to speed up meters?

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ariaaudio
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Any way to speed up meters?

Post by ariaaudio »

With one or more meter windows open, Picoscope slows down a lot. I'm using a 3206 on a Dell 2.53GHz Celeron D computer with 512MB of RAM.

Can anything be done to speed up Picoscope when meters are used?
-- mike elliott

alan
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Post by alan »

Hi,

The reason the screen update rate slows down more when a meter window is added than a scope window is that (unlike the scope of spectrum) there is no control to set what frequency range the signals you are looking at.

The meter does not know whether your voltage is just DC or contains AC frequencies. To ensure an accurate measurement it has to collect data for a long time to ensure it can pick up low frequency AC changes.

There are a few things that you can do to speed up the update rate.

1. Rather than add a meter, add measurements to the scope. There are more parameters available in measurements than in the meter and as they work with the scope data the reduction in screen update rate is minimal.

2. Ensure you have the latest version of PicoScope installed

3. If you are not interested in low frequency signal changes - for example you just want a large meter display of DC volts then there is an .ini file setting that sets the lowest frequency the meter can measure. Its not a well documented feature so I will get back to you later today with the full details on this.

Regards
Alan

markB
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Post by markB »

The ini file setting that Alan is talking about is SlowMeter.

The SlowMeter entry will only work with PS3000, PS2000 and the demo. This will slow down the meter in order to detect lower frequencies.

This will have the effect of slowing down the meter further and so will not help ariaaudio.

For anyone who is interested; you should find, in the same directory as PSW32.exe, a settings file named psw.ini. In the psw.ini file add the SlowMeter entry to the PicoScope for Windows heading:

Code: Select all

[PicoScope for Windows]
FirstTime=No
SerialNumber=None
.
.
.
SlowMeter=Yes
Mark

ariaaudio
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Post by ariaaudio »

alan wrote:Hi,

The reason the screen update rate slows down more when a meter window is added than a scope window is that (unlike the scope of spectrum) there is no control to set what frequency range the signals you are looking at.
Thanks, Alan -- I'd be happy with a meter that just acted like a DVM and updated itself with the instantaneous value of the voltage every second or so.
-- mike elliott

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