So, What's the Deal Here?

[ForcedToMakeAnAccount]

I bought a Digital Discovery upon asking a few friends what they thought I should pick up as a logic analyzer.

I've been playing with the Waveforms tool over the last few days, and unlike say, Sigrok, and a Salae, the Digital Discovery seems to consistently fail to properly capture UART transmissions, spitting out various framing errors where the other logic analyzers I have do just fine when connected.

 

The biggest issue I have however is the lack of ability to export raw binary data. Nobody I've spoken to has been able to provide any kind of solution to exporting a hexdump, or binary blob other than 'I dunno, just use the Salae', which is a little disappointing.

 

Is the Digital Discovery like a testbed product or something? I'm just not sure about all this, ya'know...

[JColvin]

Hi @ForcedToMakeAnAccount,

What settings do you have the Logic Analyzer set to on the Digital Discovery?

I'm not certain if I precisely understand what you mean by export raw binary data, but you can add individual UART channels and can change the Format option to it's default of ASCII to a different option (such as Binary). You can also adjust the expected Baud rate to either a precise baud rate or choose the Auto Arbitrary option which will automatically adjust its rate around the standard rates in case the 9600 baud (or other standard rate) the Digital Discovery is expecting does not exactly match the incoming rate. I've attached a picture of the settings I am looking at.

In terms of exporting, if you have a triggered Acquisition on screen, you can then go to File -> Export to export the data that you have (which shows the data as set up in it's settings). You can specify the data that is exported to either be the Logic Analyzer data (which would include all data including idle time at each measurement point), only detected "events", or events from a single data line.

With regards to not having to manually export the data, you can open the View -> Logging option to set up the logging (and exporting) be automatically done on each (triggered) acquisition. The Script tab in that Logging view can then be set up to export the data you want to send. So, if I wanted to export the acquisition data and have the reference screen picture as well to a folder on my Desktop, I would modify the "Export Picture and Data" Example to be the following:

if(Index > Maximum) return
Logic.Export("~/Desktop/logic/acq"+Index+".png")
Logic.Export("~/Desktop/logic/acq"+Index+".csv", "Acquisition")
Index++

The "Acquisition" on that third line can be adjusted to any of the manual Export options that you have available in File -> Export (which has it's own preview so you can see how you should expect the data to be formatted).

Let me know if you have any questions about this.

Thanks,
JColvin

[attila]

Hi @ForcedToMakeAnAccount

In Logic Analyzer under File/Export you can select various sources to export as text or image.

 

With the Protocol tool you can capture more (continuously streamed) transmission and save it to file or directly record to file.

[ForcedToMakeAnAccount]

I really appreciate the replies, and you've helped me to better understand the functions and limitations.

 

@JColvin I'm mostly talking about the industry standard workhorse sniffrom -https://github.com/alainiamburg/sniffROM and how it only works with Saleae analyzers. I just lament the DD lacking the ability to output compatible data, or Waveforms having such a function inbuilt.