“The new features are designed to empower engineers who are debugging, characterising and verifying operational reliability of complex electronic and automotive designs,” according to the company.
Included in the latest release of ‘PicoScope 7’ are:
Rise and fall time triggering, that can be set to trigger on rising or falling edge duration. Upper and lower threshold voltages can be set, as can the triggering transition time, and whether the edge in question is longer, shorter or within a range compared with the set values.
“By setting a trigger condition based on the rise or fall time specified in a device datasheet, non-compliant signals can be easily captured and observed,” according to the company. Regarding EMC compliance: “rise and fall time triggering can be used to validate that devices have been set up correctly”.
The extension can also be used to asses slower edge transitions, such as the slew-rate of motor command voltages.
For the automotive industry, a decoder for the PSI5 serial bus has been added to monitor connections between sensors and vehicle ECUs (electronic control units) – taking PicoScope’s decoder total to 38.
Automated measurement of 24 time and 10 frequency parameters are already included in the software, and another of the new extensions allow these to be automatically logged into a .csv file on the host PC for statistical analysis – for example, to allow drift to be assessed against supply voltage, temperature or time.
Adding to this, using a function that Pico calls ‘measurements actions‘, any measurement can now be automatically compared with a user-defined limit, with the comparison triggering an action including: sound a beep, play a sound, stop capture, restart capture, run an executable, save the current buffer, save all buffers, or trigger the scope’s signal generator.
“Actions enable PicoScope 7 to perform as a semi-automated tool for unattended monitoring of parameters, either in the laboratory or in the field,” said the company. “At the most basic level, if a measurement test fails, the user can be alerted with a beep to investigate the cause.”
PicoScope 7 comes in Windows, Linux and macOS versions.
Web pages:
rise-fall-time trigger
PSI5 decode
automatic logging
measurement actions
