Application Programming Interface for PC Oscilloscope

21st June 2007

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Pico Technology, worldwide leaders in the design and manufacture of PC Oscilloscopes, has launched an Application Programming Interface for the PicoScope 5000 series scopes to allow you to write your own software for the devices. The PicoScope 5000 series PC Oscilloscopes are Pico’s top-performing scopes, with the world’s fastest real-time sampling rate, for a USB PC scope, of 1 GS/s. This, together with a probe-tip bandwidth of 250 MHz, makes them ideal for use with high-speed analogue and digital signals. The scope’s huge memory buffer — either 32 M or 128 M samples depending on the version — ensures that the high sampling rate can be used on a wide range of timebases without losing detail.

The new Application Programming Interface (API) lets you go beyond the features of the PicoScope 6 software to build your own high-speed data acquisition applications based on the PicoScope 5000 scopes. Using the high-speed streaming mode built in to the driver, you can log data at up to 6 million samples per second directly to disk, or you can use block mode to capture data within the scope at the full 1 GS/s rate. You can also control the scope’s built-in Arbitrary Waveform Generator and set up advanced triggering modes such as pulse-width and interval triggers.

The API functions are exported in standard C format, which is recognised by most programming languages including C, C++, Visual Basic, Delphi and LabView. Programming examples are provided for all these languages, and the whole package can be downloaded free of charge from the Pico website as part of the PicoScope 6 software.

Alan Tong, Managing Director of Pico Technology, said “Our PicoScope 5000 series scopes are already leading the PC Oscilloscope market, but we want to take them further. By releasing this API, we are giving our customers the ability to build their own custom software based on our products.”