Over the last decade, the ability to access an oscilloscope and its data remotely has become vital to completing development projects. Globalized teams including geographically dispersed design engineers, manufacturing engineers and, at times, suppliers continue to increase. For these teams to execute efficiently and resolve issues quickly, the ability to transfer and view the same data can be a great asset. In this blog, we’ll discuss offline, online and multi-oscilloscope PC software, and what Tektronix is doing to provide the tools to access data without being in front of the oscilloscope.
To address the needs for remote access to data, there are two primary methods utilized, offline and online analysis. We’ll start the discussion with offline software.
Offline Analysis
Tektronix developed offline software to provide oscilloscope users with the ability to analyze and share data captured by an oscilloscope offline on their PCs. For an end-user, remote offline access software provides two key benefits; productivity and collaboration.
Productivity – Over the product development cycle, access to an oscilloscope’s measurement can be extremely valuable in validating designs and identifying and root causing issues. Being able to use the oscilloscope to capture data to analyze on a PC or laptop, and then make it available for another team member saves a lot of time. Add to that, the ability to import waveforms from different vendors test and measurement equipment to view information on a single platform increases analysis efficiency. An additional benefit is the savings in transit time between the lab and your desk.
Collaboration – With many companies having design, validation and manufacturing teams geographically dispersed, sharing data to provide a common starting point for conversations can be challenging. With offline software, a user can easily capture and share screen images and entire waveform records to analyze specific areas of interest. This helps teams align, identify and resolve issues faster. This can also come in handy should you need to correlate data with a supplier.
Online Analysis
While offline access provides many advantages, there are a few limitations when real-time, dynamic data captures are needed. This is where online access comes in handy. Where offline analysis software is useful in producing static images and single shot acquisitions, online analysis and the ability to remotely connect to the oscilloscope to perform and view numerous acquisitions dynamically and in real time. This can be helpful in correlating disparate analysis results when trouble shooting issues with dispersed teams or when running tests over a long time and you want to monitor the progress.
Multi-Oscilloscope Analysis
As technology advances, many applications periodically need more than four or even eight channels to complete analysis. One method to accomplish this is with multi-oscilloscope software on a PC or laptop. The primary benefits of multi-oscilloscope software are flexibility and equipment usage optimization.
Flexibility – With multi-oscilloscope software, engineers can bring multiple oscilloscopes together when needed to view and analyze data from multiple oscilloscopes on the same screen, providing channel scalability and enabling users to get more informed decisions.
Equipment Usage Optimization
Simply stated, when analysis requiring multi-oscilloscope capability is completed, the individual oscilloscopes can be used for typical uses. This provides organizations with the ability leverage their equipment investments while supporting the business’ testing needs.
Summary
As companies become more globalized with development teams across the world, having tools that allow you to complete your work with greater efficiency becomes increasingly important. To respond to customer’s requests for the ability to remotely analyze data offline and online, Tektronix is developing the next generation of TekScope and application optimized packages to support online, offline and multi oscilloscope analysis. For more information on what Tektronix is doing in this space, we encourage you to visit https://scope.tekcloud.com/ to see what’s new for off oscilloscope analysis software.