How to read 8-bit digital signal through an Agilent DSO? I just want to use the oscilloscope as a 8-bit ADC,so how to read the 8-bit digital signal from the DSO? Please help me, thank you very much!
It's DSO90254A, I just want to use the 8-bit digitalized binary signal, for example, 10100111.
The manual for that scope is 2 gigabytes, so I'm not about to download it. That being said...
Most scopes, including a different Agilent scope, have a variety of ways to save the waveform to a USB thumb drive. Most of the time you'd save the waveform as a BMP or JPG file, although saving raw data as a text file or CSV file is common too. Play around with those settings to see if there is one that you'd like.
First, I'll assume you know how to send commands and receive data back from your scope using GPIB, USB, LAN, or RS-232. If you can't get the expected response from the "*IDN?" command, then you need to work out how to do that before you try to grab waveform data.
The key programming commands to do what you want are :WAVeform:FORMat and :WAVeform:DATA? (Lower case letters in GPIB commands in Agilent documentation indicate optional letters that make the command easier for people to read, but the instrument itself will ignore)
You'll have to read the manual to get a complete information about these, but basically :WAV:FORM BYTE will tell the scope to give you data as 8-bit integers, instead of scaled floating-point numbers. :WAV:DATA? will tell the scope to actually send you the data.
When reading the data in BYTE format, you will get the data in a packed binary format, which is described in the manual. Without knowing what programming language you are using to control the scope, its hard to give more information about how to decode it.
Another option that doesn't involve decoding the GPIB binary format, is to use :WAV:DATA? with ASCii format to get the floating-point ("analog") data, then use :WAVeform:YORigin? and :WAVeform:YINCrement? to get the scaling factors. From those, you can reverse the scaling operation to turn the floating-point data back into 8-bit integers that you seem to want.
Notice that this scope actually seems to support 16-bit raw data rather than 8-bit, which will affect how you interpret the :WAV:YINC? information. It's not clear if the 8 lsb's in the 16-bit data format are actually coming from the ADC's, if they're generated by correcting for known sampling errors, if they're all set to 0, or what.
