Hi,
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I would like to transfer waveforms from my HP 54542A to a PC. In the past I have made do with floppy disks, but I find them to be unreliable and a bit of a faff. As a result I would like to use GPIB.
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I have developed a working connection between my PC and the 54542A. It responds to *IDN? etc commands fine. However, the only means I have found of transferring data is a bit cumbersome and doesn't suit my workflow. I was wondering if someone knows if there is a better way to acquire data. I have read the manual to the best of my ability, but the programming guide is huge and a bit overwhelming for me on my first foray into this sort of work.
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So far, I have been able to get a string of ASCII values by sending:
:WAVEFORM:SOURCE CHANNEL1 //We can only download one waveform at a time - I think?
:WAVEFORM:FORMAT ASCII? ? ?//To convert the output to ascii
:DIGITIZE CHAN1? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? //To actually put waveform data into some register to transfer
:WAVEFORM:DATA?? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? //Spits out waveform data - need scaling etc - looks like: 5208,5240,5272,5304,5336...
However, my workflow normally revolves around carefully retriggering the scope to capture certain events that are not captured during every trigger. I often find that after capturing a waveform, if I retrigger the scope, the signal of interest is no longer present. Therefore digitizing a channel (which seems to retrigger the scope) is very frustrating.?
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In addition, it seems quite cumbersome to only be able to download a single channel, which then needs scaling to actual voltage values.
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Is there any way to more conveniently transfer a set of waveforms that I have already captured - without the need to retrigger? Is there a way to output voltages directly - ideally similar to XY mode when saving to disk? Or have I been interpreting my outputs incorrectly?
