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.

VIDEOS: Exploring MAUI with OneTouch

Figure 1: MAUI with OneTouch makes
child's play of complex oscilloscope
operations

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a video worth, even if it's only 10 to 15 seconds long? If the videos in question illustrate how to use Teledyne LeCroy's MAUI with OneTouch next-generation user interface (Figure 1), their value is inestimable. Once you've seen how easy it is to use an oscilloscope with MAUI with OneTouch, you'll know it was time well spent.

The Evolving User Interface: Cursors, Triggers, and More

Figure 1: Need to reposition a
cursor? Touch, hold, and drag it

In our review of the evolving user interface as embodied in Teledyne LeCroy's MAUI with OneTouch gesture control, we've seen how touch, drag, swipe, pinch, and flick gestures have combined to transform the oscilloscope UI into something that enhances and encourages creativity. Here, we'll cover a few of the remaining features of OneTouch, showing how the concept permeates the MAUI UI in the recently launched WaveRunner 8000 series of instruments.

The Evolving User Interface: Add New

Figure 1: Dragging a channel, memory, math, or zoom trace
to the Add New box creates a new trace of the same type

In our ongoing exploration of the evolving user interface as embodied by Teledyne LeCroy's MAUI - Most Advanced User Interface, we've seen how the addition of OneTouch gesture control and features such as Copy Setup and Change Source have made the touchscreen UI even more powerful, flexible, and intuitive. These features let you get the most out of an oscilloscope's functionality at lightning speed without fussing with menus or dialogs.

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).

The Evolving Oscilloscope User Interface

Figure 1: MAUI is Teledyne LeCroy's
intuitive touch-based user interface

The means of interaction with test equipment has steadily evolved and improved over the years. Concepts such as remote control, for instance, broadened the possibilities for users of oscilloscopes and other equipment. Advancing display technology brought helpful elements such as color coding of traces, while more powerful graphics processing and computing gave us multiple grids, and so on.

Oscilloscope Basics: Choosing an Oscilloscope

Figure 1: An oscilloscope such as
Teledyne LeCroy's HDO6054-MS
serves a very broad range of
applications

Choosing an oscilloscope might seem to be a challenging task, but it doesn't have to be. Rather, it's a more-or-less logical process based on your measurement needs. Having said that, if the application for the instrument is "general lab work," the decision can become trickier.

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.