<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> And now I feel I understand the ngscopeclient UI design a bit more 😆 But the UI on this has to be the most intuitive of any scope I have ever touched… thank you for the recommendation
<d1b2>
<chille0417> I'm to poor to even know what you use a 33 GHz oscilloscope for lol.
<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> It’s not for personal use 😂 We’re designing an embedded system that is using PCIe gen 4 internally (16Gbit/s)
<d1b2>
<esden> If you are casually buying a 33GHz scope for your hobby you are officially a 1%ter 😛
<d1b2>
<esden> that sounds like fun!
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<d1b2>
<azonenberg> lol yeah it's definitely inspired by MAUI in ways
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> but optimized for mouse and keyboard rather than touch
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> i tried to take what they did well and fix some things i felt they didn't
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> yeah they pay me well but not THAT well. I barely managed to afford a 16 GHz scope for professional-adjacent work and that was only because i found the eBay deal of a lifetime for a ten year old scope
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> the scope in that pic new is probably half a million USD +/- 25% as a ballpark
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> depending on exactly what options you get
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> @vipqualitypost did you try their sorry excuse for a filter graph and compare it to ours? :p
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> that's imo one of their biggest weaknesses in the UI
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> the fact that it's not nearly as well integrated and it just feels clunky
<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> yes, lol
<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> that said, nobody else has a filter graph AFAIK so something is better than nothing 🙂
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> by the lol i take it you weren't impressed :p
<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> I mean, the ngscopeclient filter graph is just so good...
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> duh lol
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> its like our single biggest killer feature for serious work like this
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> like, if you have an entry level 1000 series scope you won't benefit from it as much in some cases
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> but for things like this where you wanna just keep tacking on measurements and analysis and what-ifs
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> and compare e.g. an eye as-is vs one with a cable de-embed
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> (the one thing i really want to do is enable better copy-paste and duplication of common subgraphs like "recover a clock and display an eye from it" or "decode pcie gen1/2"
<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> Don't remember if I mentioned it but I demoed ngscopeclient to the R&D crew at my work and they were pretty impressed and a few may start more regularly using it for data analysis (unconnected to an instrument, but just as a viewing platform)
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> Nice
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> if they have any issues definitely point them my way. I'm always looking for more serious industry users
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> the high end has always been my real focus... like, sure all of this comes with benefits to hobbyists and people with basic scopes too, and i'm not opposed to adding some kind of a "noob mode" that simplifies the UI to make it easier to get started
<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> your guess is bang on, +- 5% 😁
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> but i want to make a tool people will use with a scope like that
<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> This is what I have kind of come to as well - the software is so powerful that actually, for the first time, I am finding myself more limited by my frontend/acquisition rather than my analysis
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> and be competitive with or exceeding the feature set of what the big name vendors are shipping for a lot of the areas we focus on
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> 😄
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> Exactly
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> you can now probably decode ethernet on a 70 MHz rigol if you don't mind poor WFM/s and a not-very-pretty eye
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> its all a question of how good the source signal is
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> because thats the one thing you cant fix in software lol
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> although i have done some pretty impressive things with oversampling and de-embeds if i just wanted to do protocol decoding and didn't care about SI analysis
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> like 10Gbase-R on my 4 GHz waverunner
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> or a 25G PRBS on my 16 GHz
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> i actually wrote the ngscopeclient 64/66b and 10Gbase-R decodes before i got the big scope lol
<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> yeah, and it's kind of surprising how cheap you can get amazing analog front-ends for if you don't tack on every option ever for FFT, protocols, etc etc
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> the eyes looked like garbage, there was a ton of ISI because i was well beyond the -3 dB
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> but it was open enough to reliably tell a 1 from a 0
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> and that was all i needed
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> So which scopes have you demoed at this point?
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> besides the SDA
<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> A tek (something, huge name), keysight UXR, and this SDA
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> what are your thoughts on pros and cons of each? i havent used any of the leading edge from tek/keysight
<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> the SDA is my favorite so far and by a long shot the most likely thing we pick, due to the dual inputs on FE so you can probe 'normal' signals, and the MSO logic analyzer dongle thing, as well as the UI
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> so i'm curious how they compared. the SDA is a 12 bit ADC instead of an 8, and higher bandwidth, but otherwise a direct descendent of the 8Zi series I have
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> Yep thats an absolute killer feature for when you need to trigger e.g. off PERST# or something
<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> the cost is so high that we need to share it with other business units in our company, so flexibility is a big plus for us
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> for lower BW signals you can also hook both inputs up simultaneously and use it as a mux to probe one or the other without physically touching the DUT
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> did you mention ngscopeclient to the sales guy and/or try it with the demo scope? we dont have official support for the SDA HD's but i expect them to mostly work other than changing sample rate/memory depth
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> i just havent got time on one to implement that but it'd be trivial to add
<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> the tek thing is basically a PCIe validation machine... the UI is bad, very hard to find things, does not look good, strictly limited to just high BW inputs +-4V, built in screen is too tiny so you must use external monitor to do anything meaningful
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> (and tek's scpi stack is horribly unstable so it wouldn't perform well with ngscopeclient either)
<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> The keysight was OK. I have always had a soft spot for keysight. I didn't get much time with it, but it just felt OK. Not amazing but not disappointing like the tek
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> well glad you liked the lecroy 😄
<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> I did mention it, but the guy did not seem to know about it, lol. I have not had a chance to try it, although I would like to do that but need to figure out how to network it first (our IT is a bit roundabout)
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> you should be able to cable directly to the scope, it just runs windows
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> and sidestep any IT issues
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> set up random 192.168 addresses
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> if you wanted to be able to remotely access it, different story
<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> As in ethernet direct from scope to my PC? ethernet can do that?
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> Yes. There's no need for routing or even switching for a point to point link
<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> oh, cool.
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> just give both devices IPs in the same subnet
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> manually assigned since there's no DHCP server running (unless you actually run one yourself)
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> default gateway doesnt matter
<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> I'll give it a try tomorrow!
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> the only gotcha is if you are also on wifi or something with your laptop, make sure the subnets don't collide
<d1b2>
<duskwuff> always has, and it's gotten better with GbE since auto-mdix is now mandatory
<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> I never knew!
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> yep. in the early days you had to have a crossover cable that swapped tx and rx signals
<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> I've got a bunch of those kicking around in my lab still, lol
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> switches/routers and endpoint devices would have inverted pinouts
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> so you could use straight through cables to connect them
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> but you'd have to use a crossover for say a switch to a switch
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> since gigabit nobody's cared about that
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> in my own switch firmware, i do support explicit manual control over MDI-X to force it to one polarity or the other by PHY register settings
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> the use case there is to allow me to probe the link and reliably see device A or B's traffic on a specific set of signals
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> if you're not scoping the cat5 it doesnt matter :p
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> 99% of 10/100 devices these days will also support auto crossover (or if they don't, the device you're plugging it into probably does - you only need it at one end for it to correctly detect and swap)
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> but gig mandates it
<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> That's really neat! OK I will try that tomorrow and see if I can make something work.
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> Sounds good. Let me know if you run into any issues, also if you can send me the model name it reports over SCPI i can work on auto detection for memory depth and sample rate etc
<d1b2>
<vipqualitypost> We have it for a handful more days and then the sales guy is driving back up to reclaim it :>
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> silly sales guy wanting his expensive hardware back lol
<d1b2>
<azonenberg> well lmk if you guys end up buying it