Embedded Developer

A recent change to a PCB design has given the opportunity to try out a couple of KiCad plugins. The board is a simple one and is used to provide feedback when running network soak tests. The board is designed for the Meadow ecosystem and is a fairly simple design consisting of:

• SSD1306 OLED display
• Indicator LEDs
• Reset button
• Headers to connect the board to a Meadow board

The board has been tested and it works well. The changes doubled the number of LEDs and changed some of the components footprints.

Round Tracks

The concept behind Round Tracks is simple, take a PCB layout and give the tracks the feel of the 1970s. It does this by taking the layout and looking for any tracks that change direction. The plugin then takes these tracks and rounds the corners.

Applying this to the OLED PCBs gives the following output:

PCBWay Plug-in for KiCad

The next plugin is the PCBWay plugin. This should take the PCB layout and generate a zip file to upload to the PCBWay web site for manufacture. It appears to be really simple to use and starts an order for you and then uploads the files into the order.

Order submitted and now we just have to wait for the PCBs to arrive.

Conclusion

Manufacturing is complete and they are now on their way. There is going to be a small wait while the PCBs make their way from China to the UK and then we can see how the plugins faired.

Update to follow in a few weeks.

For the last year or so, the goto scope in the lab has been a Rigol MSO5104. This is a 100MHz, 4 channel scope with 16 digital channels. Connectivity options include USB and wired LAN. The LAN connection allows the scope to be controller via a web control panel which is great for interactive control from a host computer but is not much use for automation.

Enter pyvisa.

Hackaday Article

Hackaday published an article Grabbing Data From a Rigol Scope with Python in late November of 2023. It appears that I am not the only one looking to control a Rigol oscilloscope from a host computer.

The article discusses using pyvisa to communicate with a DHO900-series scope not a MSO5000-series scope, let’s see if the same commands will work with the MSO5104.

Communicating With The MSO5104

First up, try to connect to the scope over the LAN:

import pyvisa
visa = pyvisa.ResourceManager('@py')
scope = visa.open_resource('TCPIP::192.168.1.95::INSTR')

So that seemed to work, so let’s try to get the scope to identify itself:

scope.query('*IDN?')
'RIGOL TECHNOLOGIES,MSO5104,MS5A*********,00.01.03.03.00\n'

So far, so good, the * characters represent part of the devices serial number. Now let’s try a few commands to see if we can make the scope to do something:

scope.write(':SINGLE')
9

This changes the mode of the scope to single shot and the Single button turned on as if it had been pressed. The return value is the number of characters sent to the scope.

Conclusion

It appears that the original Hackaday article is going to be part of a series of articles as a follow-up article was published a few days later (see Scope GUI Made Easier). This could turn into something useful.