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Rigol as a front end for a PC based oscilloscope

A project log for Silly hardware wishlist

Too simple for a project page & which may never happen.

lion-mclionheadlion mclionhead 06/16/2020 at 18:480 Comments

The lion kingdom's obsolete Rigol is hardly ever used & not used even to its 20 year old potential, but the desire has come & gone to give it a PC interface in order to add newer features.  Past wishes have been a higher resolution waveform, a persistent waveform.  

The latest desire came from Dave: a way to manually specify the sample rate & buffer size.  Digital scopes have adhered to the traditional analog interface by hiding all the digital aspects behind a traditional time scale when in fact they really need to allow the user to change buffer sizes & sample rates.  Whether to use a double buffer to increase the waveform update rate should also be user configurable.

There are existing programs which allow replacing the front panel with UART commands, but not completely replace the waveform display with a PC.

https://github.com/wd5gnr/qrigol



There is the official ultrascope program for Windows, which is incredibly slow & doesn't provide any enhancement beyond the physical interface.



https://www.rigolna.com/download/

The serial protocol over USB might be too slow to update the waveform fast enough.


A game changer would be a paw pedal for the start/stop button.  It's been done years ago, but to this day isn't a standard feature.


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