Warning Check your wallet, is it safe?


First to get the waveform from the Velleman Scope, fire up minicom set to 9600N81 at /dev/ttyS1 (com2 in the DOS world) assuming you plugged the Scope into the second serial port, The Velleman K7105 LCD Oscilloscope, outputs a series of X,Y coordinate point pairs with a header at the beginning, upon powerup, of any waveform that is on "hold".

Take as many waveforms as you wish, one at a time though, as the Velleman only holds one waveform at a time. Unless you have the Data Opto-Isolator you need to unplug the BNC connector that leads to the probe, which may still be connected to your test setup, failure to do this could result in damage to your computer the scope, and or the components in the circuit under test.

To take an input signal into a waveform data file, with the Scope completely disconnected from the computer, measure your waveform, and when you like what you see press the Hold button, and turn the Velleman off. Disconnect the BNC connector, and plug in the data to RS232 adaptor, I made my own, plugging in both ends, effectively coupling the Scopes data signal to the computer. Start minicom with logging activated, and lay in a descriptive filename. Press the power button. The Velleman upon powerup squirts out one hundred point pairs, and stops. Close the log file, disconnect the RS232 data cable, reconnect the BNC turn on the Velleman Scope, and press the Hold button again to go back to normal mode. You are now ready to take another waveform.

After you have taken as many waveforms as you like, fire up the mathematical visualization package called Grace. Don't fiddle with the defaults, leave'em alone, open the file box, go down to read, left click, go to sets, left click, go to the filename filter box, left click, change it to the directory where you stored your Velleman data, and end it with a star, example:

/usr/home/zap-tek/veldat/*

The right panel below now has your Velleman files, and maybe some others, locate the one you want by, clicking on one of them, and home in on the one you want, by using the up/down arrows, and press enter. You will get a box that says...

Error parsing line 2, skipped
Error parsing line 3, skipped

This happens because of the Header at the beginning of the Velleman data set, left click OK, and you now have the first data set autoscaled, and everything, repeat this procedure to superimpose later waveforms on-top of the existing plot, if that is what you wish, and upon doing the last one, left click on Cancel, (not OK, Ok will replot the same data set again, screwing up the color scheme, which is perfect, if left untouched)

Now go back to the File box, and left click the "Device Setup" under Print. Set "Device" to "PNG", Set "Filename" to something with a dot png extension, under "Page" set Size to "Custom", and Dimensions to 575.00 by 450.00, and units are in pixels, so select "Pix" in the selector box to the right. I left the "Resolution" at the default "72 Dpi" personally I don't see how Dpi, eg. dots per inch, has any meaning in a PNG file. Under fonts turn off antialiasing and device fonts, then click on Accept. Now to actually generate a PNG file, left click on File, go down to "Print" and left click on it. Instantly you have a file with the name you laid-in that is a PNG file, and scaled as I use with my webpage. I then use Xpaint to crop, and annotate the resulting dot png file.

You can learn more about this amazing LCD Data Scope but this is an offsite link so remember your back button, or better yet bookmark where you are now. Note this is not an endorsement, I simply list it here, cuz, it's the one I use, and I've had real good luck with it, your mileage as they say, may vary.


Back lesson 014

The large print Giveth, and the small print Taketh away

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Copyright © 2000 Jim Phillips

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