The Evolving User Interface: Changing Sources

Figure 1: Changing the source of a trace is as simple as
a drag-and-drop of the desired source's descriptor box onto
the target descriptor box

A truly modern oscilloscope user interface should lend itself to free-form experimentation in the interest of design and debug. Impulses to "try something" are at the core of creativity; you never want your test bench to stifle them. It should stay out of your way and not force you to stop and think about how to interact with the oscilloscope to make "something" happen. That's what Teledyne LeCroy has achieved by augmenting its MAUI - Most Advanced User Interface with OneTouch gesture control, a set of drag-and-drop actions that bring even more intuitiveness and flexibility to oscilloscopes' touchscreens (we covered another feature, Copy Setup, in an earlier post).

Debug often calls for creative thinking. One of many elements of MAUI with OneTouch supporting creativity is the ability to quickly and easily change the source of a signal trace or a measurement. In the initial post of this series on OneTouch, we described how all analog and digital (if it's a mixed-signal oscilloscope, of course) input channels, zoom traces, math traces, and memory traces are summarized in descriptor boxes at the bottom left of the front panel. To change the source of a trace, OneTouch allows the user to simply drag-and-drop the descriptor box you want as your signal source onto the descriptor box of the channel (or zoom, math, memory, or digital trace) you want to have that source as its input (Figure 1).

Figure 2: The Change Source gesture enables quick changing
of the source for a measurement

Oscilloscopes without MAUI with OneTouch also permit these source changes, naturally, but it's a good deal more complicated to implement them. You'd need to open the dialog box for the target and manually change the source, which takes time and introduces opportunities for errors. Incidentally, OneTouch also allows you to drag and drop a source descriptor box into a trace's dialog if you wish to.

The Change Source gesture also serves to change the source of a measurement. Doing so is as simple as dragging and dropping the descriptor box of the desired source onto the parameter (Px) column of the Measure table. You can do the same to a qualifier (Qx) on the Pass/Fail readout table.

Again, the Change Source feature of MAUI OneTouch gesture control is among many of the UI's features intended to facilitate rapid "what-if" experimentation and debug possibilities. Stay tuned for more on OneTouch soon.