A few years back, I purchased an Owon HDS242 handheld oscilloscope. Being a Linux user, I thought there surely would be some programs that would allow you to interface with this o-scope from your computer, but for the most part, the good stuff seemed to be Windows only.
I did find a few Linux programs, such as OwonOszi, and I posted about them on this blog. Unfortunately, most of the programs either didn’t work, or they did work but only to display recorded files and screen shots. Now, those are still good things, but I was looking for something that could view live data instead.
Recently, however, I was approached electronically by Sichardtg, who has been writing just such a tool. Now, keep in mind that this is in the alpha stages, or perhaps in the pre-alpha stages, but he has been using python to build a SCPI based live view software which can interface with the Owon HDS242 (and perhaps other models in the future) to display on your computer. It is called osci-SCPI, and you can find it on github[1]. To be clear, I am not helping program or write code, but rather helping with alpha testing.
If you can see the screen shot above, you’ll note it has a simple, yet effective graph that updates through the HDS242’s HID USB interface to the computer. There are a lot of benefits to this, such as *someday* being able to use this software, or software based on this work, to record, playback, or detect and trigger off of the input to the computer from the O-scope. And that is something that I think would be very handy to fellow electronics and ham radio enthusiast in the future. Often when trying to measure something, it happens too quickly for you to get a good read on it on the screen. Also, when doing precision work, it can sometimes be difficult to work the controls of the handheld o-scope while performing tests and experiments, yet with something like this, once fully fledged, could make that work easier.
An example I can think of was when I was building an Arduino TNC, and making my own modifications. When it didn’t transmit properly, I used this HDS242 to watch the output and used the recording function to record what happened, because it would happen too quickly for me to see. So I had to start the recording, do the work, stop the recording, and then play it back to see what happened. With a computer based software, it is conceivable to have that function integrated with some sort of buffer and time control or slider to go back and look at what just happened.
Granted, this osci-SCPI software is not there yet, but it’s the start of great things, and I’m glad the author asked me to come along for the ride!
Linux – keep it simple.