[HN Gopher] Making Screenshots of Test Equipment Old and New
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Making Screenshots of Test Equipment Old and New
Author : zdw
Score : 127 points
Date : 2024-11-30 05:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (tomverbeure.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (tomverbeure.github.io)
| greatgib wrote:
| This is really a great job!
|
| This is the old style open source community that I love something
| and that is often shadowed by big commercial open core projects
| pretending that they need to change their license because others
| are using they work...
|
| Like in the good old time, such projects are often made by Linux
| users just desperate to have a good solution to their problems
| and happy to share it with others.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > This is the old style open source community that I love
| something and that is often _shadowed_ by big commercial open
| core projects pretending that they need to change their license
| because others are using they work...
|
| Overshadowed?
| rnewme wrote:
| In the popular HN discussions. They generate more fuss
| aspenmayer wrote:
| I would tend to agree with you and OP, and I also
| appreciate the project that TFA uses, which seems pretty
| cool:
|
| https://github.com/tomverbeure/fake_parallel_printer
|
| https://tomverbeure.github.io/2023/01/24/Fake-Parallel-
| Print...
| guenthert wrote:
| > The biggest take-away is that they're expensive (>$100 second
| hand) and hard to configure when using Linux.
|
| The original (or fake, who knows) from Agilent cost that much,
| yes, but there is AR488 [1], which can be had for pocket money. I
| have limited experience myself with it (I got the Agilent one),
| but it seemed to work just fine.
|
| The Agilent one is a bit tricky as its firmware is uploaded when
| it powers up (is connected to USB) and changes then its ID. That
| however is well documented and with recent versions of linux-gpib
| should just work (it does for me).
|
| Then there are GPIB host adaptors for ISA, PCI and PCIe busses.
| The latter might be expensive and working PC MB with ISA hard to
| find, but those with PCI are readily available on the secondary
| market for reasonable prices. I made good experience with one
| from CEC.
|
| [1] https://github.com/Twilight-Logic/AR488
| vq wrote:
| I've had luck with the Prologix Ethernet<->GPIB adapters[0]. At
| $500 I wouldn't call them cheap but they are a lot easier to
| integrate than those old NI/Keysight PCI/USB-based interfaces.
|
| [0]: https://prologix.biz/product/gpib-ethernet-controller/
| georgeburdell wrote:
| Not to mention the preponderance of Chinese fakes on the market
| that die after a few months
| c0nsumer wrote:
| This is pretty slick. A fun next-layer would be adding on
| something to automatically convert output and slot it into files
| in directories or something. Maybe accessible via network, maybe
| an SD card or so...
| msarnoff wrote:
| I work on old systems with big parallel buses, so a while ago I
| bought a big HP 16500C chassis with something like 128 logic
| analyzer channels.
|
| It can handle a full 68000 bus no problem, but it's cumbersome
| and unwieldy. (The X11 interface mentioned in the article is
| nifty though, I remember having the same issue with fonts.)
|
| I love my Saleae and even the cheap USB logic analyzers work fine
| with Sigrok. But everything is either 8 or 16 channels.
|
| I realize it's a niche-of-a-niche use case, but is anyone making
| USB logic analyzers with 64+ channels at a hobbyist price point
| (or DIY)?
| msarnoff wrote:
| Trivia: I looked through old sales brochures and did the math
| and calculated that the price of that HP 16500C new, adjusted
| for inflation, would be over $80,000. I paid $200, and I'm sure
| there are plenty that people have just given away for free.
| tverbeure wrote:
| I upgraded from two 16500A boat anchors [1] ($20 a piece) to a
| 1670G [2]. But you're right: I much prefer my DSLogic UPro 16.
| Like many others, I've started designing my own 64 channel
| logic analyzer, but like just as many, I never completed it.
| There are almost no use cases. When I need to debug wide busse,
| it's usually in an FPGA and then a signaltap is the way to go.
|
| [1]
| https://tomverbeure.github.io/2022/06/17/HP16500a-teardown.h...
|
| [2] https://tomverbeure.github.io/2023/12/26/Controlling-an-
| HP-1...
| echoangle wrote:
| Can you maybe use multiple logic analyzers and sync them by
| connecting one channel of every logic analyzer to the same
| clock signal?
| bpye wrote:
| Not 64 channels, but for 32 channels I'm a fan of the DSLogic
| U3Pro32 [0]. DreamSourceLab did historically violate the GPL
| license of Sigrok, but have since made the source code for
| their fork available [1], unfortunately last i checked the
| U3Pro32 wasn't supported in upstream Sigrok.
|
| It does have trigger in and trigger out - so you might be able
| to use multiple together - though I've not tried.
|
| [0] https://www.dreamsourcelab.com/product/dslogic-series/
|
| [1] https://github.com/DreamSourceLab/DSView
| 4ntiq wrote:
| > My Siglent SDS 2304X was my first oscilloscope.
| jeffbee wrote:
| None of this equipment is "old" if the screenshot doesn't involve
| a film camera mounted to the CRT.
| tverbeure wrote:
| I don't really like the esthetic of _really_ old test equipment
| so I tend to stick with stuff that's 1980s or later. Those
| tends to have digital interfaces.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yeah, they're not beautiful or really useful any more. I
| think the old way of capturing screenshots with a Polaroid is
| only interesting because it explains "single sweep" mode on
| the scope, which is vestigial nonsense on a DSO.
| contingencies wrote:
| Single on Rigol at least seems to be a trigger mode, not a
| display mode, the other options being 'auto' and 'normal',
| both of which allow constant refreshes when the trigger
| event re-occurs. This appears to be a distinct branch of
| evolution from the semantic interface etymology you
| reference.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I use single captures on digital scopes all the time to
| avoid losing intermittent signals when it is hard to get
| what you want with normal+stop. It's also sometimes
| annoying on scopes with normal/auto multiplexed onto the
| start operation to switch back to normal mode through menus
| when a single button is right there.
| contingencies wrote:
| Some modern systems use an ethernet kludge known as LXI.
| https://github.com/lxi-tools/lxi-tools works easily: _lxi
| screenshot -a <ip>_ See https://github.com/lxi-tools/lxi-
| tools/wiki#background-infor... or example workflow at
| https://github.com/vk2diy/adxi/blob/main/kicad-pcbs/adxi/REA...
| tverbeure wrote:
| Yeah, a couple of years ago I wrote blog post that goes over
| all the different protocols:
| https://tomverbeure.github.io/2020/06/07/Making-Sense-of-
| Tes....
|
| None of my equipment has LXI though, and the Ethernet equipment
| that I have has been painful to use. See the Siglent troubles
| in this blog post, or older equipment which often doesn't
| support DHCP at all.
| contingencies wrote:
| It seems everything is an SCPI-derivative these days, and
| that is a protocol family not a protocol, one which could
| only be ill-defined and heavily vendor-extended/interpreted
| to the point of assumed uninteroperability at best. That
| said, it works. I wouldn't buy new test equipment now without
| LXI or some similarly scriptable interface. Manual
| configuration just creates too much scope for error during
| testing. Coming from software, electronics is hard enough
| without the fuzz-factor of human fur-ball and fat-finger
| physics frappery. Automation is worth its weight in gold,
| even if you don't value your own time highly. And the
| lifetime for equipment that can be automated is much higher
| as it can become part of fixed production or test setups and
| thus handily serve in-place as precision automation for
| common unit operations. Even just the documentation value of
| "these were the settings, this was the (precise or relative)
| time" is infinitely higher than manual fudge-work. That's why
| this good gear is going cheap - nobody commercial wants it,
| because it's behind the 8 ball from an era where flying solo
| with fuzzy manual process was fine. Skilled as any IC's
| engineering may be, if they get hit by a bus the company
| would prefer to have dropped $10K extra on test equipment
| this side of Y2K.
|
| I guess that's why it's nice to see this project - because
| you're essentially helping to rescue gear that would be
| discarded for hassle-factor or manual-only interface and
| providing some portion of modern functions.
| buccal wrote:
| Nice overview. What should be mentioned is that HPGL and EPS (PCL
| maybe as well) are vector formats and you can use Inkscape to
| edit and convert them to SVG or PDF files. Vector formats provide
| great lossless scaling and other advantages.
| tverbeure wrote:
| The EPS output of the HP 54825A is definitely a bitmap though.
|
| I personally prefer the screen cap to a close a possible to the
| original screen to keep the old school look. Vector output
| don't have that.
| eitally wrote:
| I used to run software development for the rest engineering and
| quality tools used internally by Sanmina (high-tech electronics
| mfr). Granted, we had some control over the hardware in use at
| our factories, but we have been doing similar work to this since
| about 2007. The screen caps were just to reinforce the [much
| easier to extract via API] parametric data, but it was surprising
| how frequently a test engineer referred back to them.
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