Scoping It Out

I've had a Siglent 1104X-E for a while. It's a pretty nice budget 4-channel scope, all things considered. It's great for quickly checking a waveform, figuring out its frequency, and even doing a little bit of logic decoding. However, I have a project coming up where I'd like to do quite a lot of automated measurements for validating something, and doing that manually by capturing a waveform on the screen, moving cursors around, calculating offsets between pulses, etc is just not going to  happen.

Luckily this scope comes with a USB and ethernet connection straight out of the box. Except cables are for peasants so let's give this thing wifi instead.

This $10 TP-Link adapter, which is apparently the spanish version, a fact I did not notice while purchasing, is identical to Siglent's $50 adapter, just with 40 less dollars on the price tag. However, you do need to ensure that you get one of the V2 or V3 models, not the V4, because of course they changed the chipset without changing the part number because why wouldn't they?

Anyway, with the correct version obtained, it just plugs right into the USB A port on the back of the unit.

And then it just auto-detects as soon as it boots up. From there it needs a little bit of fiddling and faffing to connect it to the network (picking the right SSID, entering the PSK, the usual stuff) and then it's good to go.

And hey, there it is.

And it shows an input signal just fine over the connection.

And you can even expand the UX to show all the controls.

But most importantly you can also access the instrument via SCPI to automatically capture and offload raw data from the scope. That means I can do my automated data collection and analysis with just a simple python script. Sweet.