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I am using an oscilloscope from LeCroy and am confused as to how to have the scope sample and write data to disk at 1kHz.

When I run the Low-Speed Measurement Data Logger Script which would make the scope acquire and save data to a file on the hard disk, even though I programmed the script so that it would write to file every 1 millisecond, the actual file results show that data were logged every 100 millisecond.

I realize later that the scope requires time to acquire and process the data which caused the delay.

I also tried to find ways to live-stream data from scope to my computer, which failed due to hardware constraints.

What are some other ways to enable faster data logging on the hard disk?

YumekaMengjiaLYU
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  • Can you buffer 1000 reads at a time, and write them to the disk all at once? Ideally do it while sampling to a second buffer. – Drew Dec 01 '20 at 19:13
  • Are you sure it wasn't buffering 100 samples per write already? –  Dec 01 '20 at 19:30
  • @Drew thanks for the idea! I tried to save all the measurements in a string and write to disk at once (using VBA https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31183930/write-multiple-lines-at-once-instead-of-using-writeline-to-improve-performance). Still the time stamps show that the data were logged per ~100ms. I wonder if the scope has to take that long to acquire the data/measurement from the waveform. – YumekaMengjiaLYU Dec 01 '20 at 20:08
  • Scope runs under Windows 7 and the hard drive appears to be mechanical, so 1ms seems a bit optimistic. What is your sampling rate? – Bruce Abbott Dec 01 '20 at 21:17
  • This isn't really what a scope is designed to do. If you need a kilosample continuously, you probably want something more like an Arduino (cheap) or traditional data acquisition system (mid-range) streaming data back to the PC. What you pay the big bucks for in a scope is the ability to get an isolated snapshot at a very high sample rate. Streaming low sample rates is a different problem, fortunately a cheaper one. Yes, in theory a scope could do this with hacky software, but few actually offer it. – Chris Stratton Dec 01 '20 at 23:18

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