Pico Technology Adds More To Picoscope Oscilloscope Software

The new Reference Waveforms feature allows users to display stored waveforms or math channels alongside live data. To add a reference waveform, users click a button and select which channel to store. Users can build up as many as eight waveforms, reference or live, in each scope view, and open as many scope views as required.

The other major new feature is XY Mode. This allows users to plot one or more input channels against another, or against a math channel or reference waveform. This can be used to display the I-V curve of a component, or to indicate the phase relationship between two periodic signals.

Amongst the other improvements in this release is a new trigger mode. “Rapid Mode” captures a sequence of triggered waveforms while freezing the display, and thus obtains the shortest possible dead time between captures – as little as a microsecond, depending on the model of scope in use. Users can then scroll through the sequence using the buffer navigation buttons. This mode gives the best chance of finding a rare intermittent glitch, which users can then print, measure or save to disk.

Other significant new features are the graphical Arbitrary Waveform Editor, which lets users create, save, load and edit arbitrary waveforms for use with the PicoScope 2000 or 5000 Series scope; and support for Windows Vista 64-bit in addition to 32-bit XP and Vista.

Alan Tong, Managing Director of Pico Technology, explained: “You can download a free copy of PicoScope 6.2.1 on our website at labs.picotech.com. As always, we give free technical support and free updates to all our customers. Even if you don’t have a Pico oscilloscope, you can still download the software and try it out.”