Getting The Most Out Of Your Oscilloscope: Navigation With MAUI

Figure 1: Oscilloscope UIs such as
Teledyne LeCroy's MAUI provide
tons of shortcuts and touch gestures

Today's real-time digital oscilloscopes are easier to use than their predecessors, and new models get easier all the time. Oscilloscopes often are equipped with touch screens and elaborate user interfaces that provide a plethora of shortcuts and smartphone-like touch gestures that make common operations extremely fast and easy.

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).

Video: WaveSurfer 3000 and the MAUI User Interface

Oscilloscopes are often an engineer's best friend, but that can change depending on how easy or difficult a given instrument is to use. Sure, the oscilloscope's capabilities and technical specs are critical, but if the machine is difficult or non-intuitive to interact with, the user ends up wasting time figuring out what should be simple.

Oscilloscope Basics: Controlling an Oscilloscope (Part II)

Figure 1: An example of a
touch screen-equipped
oscilloscope.

In a recent post, we discussed how to control a modern digital oscilloscope using the front-panel controls. That was a natural place to begin, given that it's the "traditional" means of controlling the instrument and the one that most seasoned users cut their teeth on. But there's more than one way to skin this cat these days. Many of today's oscilloscopes carry touch screens that do everything the front-panel controls can do, plus some things they cannot do.

Oscilloscope Basics: Controlling An Oscilloscope (Part I)

Figure 1: Front of HDO4054 oscilloscope

At first glance, the front of today's oscilloscopes can be daunting. For starters, there's an array of physical "hard" controls. Relatively recent models may also sport touch screen displays with so-called "soft" controls. For one thing, getting familiar with the front of these instruments is only a matter of experimentation and common sense. And for another, what at first may seem complex is carefully designed to make the instrument as easy to operate as possible. This is the first installment of a projected series of posts that will explain how to control a modern oscilloscope. Here, we'll start with the front panel.