- From: Brent Baccala <baccala_at_vger.freesoft.org>
- Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 05:18:06 -0400 (EDT)
Hi -
I'm pleased to announce the availability of xoscope 1.10 for download
from xoscope.sourceforge.net.
xoscope is a Digital Storage Oscilloscope (DSO) for Linux.
New features in xoscope 1.10 include COMEDI support, improved X
Windows performance, an improved Bitscope GUI, a more modular internal
organization, and support for using the parallel port for digital
acquisition (via COMEDI and RTAI).
xoscope 1.10 is a development release. Users, and in particular,
COMEDI users, are requested and encouraged to download xoscope 1.10 to
verify its operation with their particular configuration. Current
development plans are for an xoscope version 2 that will switch to
a completely GTK/Glade-based GUI and provide the oscilloscope window
as a widget in a shared library that can be easily integrated into
other applications. Before that happens, I wish to stabilize the
version 1 series. Developers are actively sought.
New features:
- COMEDI support
COMEDI (www.comedi.org) is the Linux Control and Measurement Device
Interface, "a collection of drivers for data acquisition hardware".
Via COMEDI, xoscope adds support for over 50 new hardware devices,
most of them specifically designed for real-time data acquisition.
Both analog and digital acquisition modes are supported, at arbitrary
time bases and sampling rates. Voltage scales, if reported by the
device, are drawn accurately. If xoscope, upon starting, detects the
presense of a COMEDI device on the system, it immediately attempts to
begin sampling from the device at its maximum data rate and displaying
the data as an oscilloscope trace.
- X Windows performance
Rather than using a time-consuming pixmap copy for its screen updates,
xoscope now draws directly to the display, and only uses an off-screen
pixmap for storing traces in accumulate mode. The result is a far
more responsive application less demanding on CPU resources.
- Bitscope GUI
An unfinished Glade option dialog will allow Bitscope users to select
more advanced triggering options. Unfortunately, I have no Bitscope
to test this feature on! A Bitscope developer is badly needed!
- more modular internal organization
A clean separation, with a well-defined API, now exists between the
display code and the data acquisition sources, hopefully making it
easier to add new data sources in the future. The new API is not yet
completely fixed; in particular, I'm giving serious thought to
seperating the data acquisition function into a seperate thread, which
would require the API to define thread synchronization. Comments are
welcome.
- parallel port support
Several people have requested the ability to use the parallel port as
a simple digital data acquisition source. That is now supported,
indirectly, via the new COMEDI interface. COMEDI includes a driver
for the parallel port, as well as the ability to perform timed
acquisitions with the support of a real-time kernel enhancement, such
as RTAI or RT-Linux. Only RTAI has been tested. Note that this
requires re-compilation of the Linux kernel and all its modules
(unless your kernel already has a real-time extension). Details are
in the "README.parport" file in the distribution.
--
-bwb
Brent Baccala
baccala_at_freesoft.org
Received on 2003-06-30Z08:18:06