BenF another feature request

Hi BenF, First I want to apologize for my bad english, and tell you that your software is impressive, now the dso nano is a more powerful tool. I am an automotive technician, and do a lot of diagnostics with my NANO. but most of the time is very dificult to set the dso according to what i want to measure. in other post a read acooment you made about capturing the ignition pulse of an ignition system, Seems that you know about automotive electronics. would it be posible to save the settings on the sd card (for example 10v div/ 2ms for the injector),and give the proper names(like inj. or O2 sens. etc)?
It will also be helpfull if you can loadf the presseting along with the reference signal (like the picture atached).
thank you very much for your improvements, and again sorry for my bad english. :mrgreen
Injector Ref.jpg

We feel guilty not being able to satisfy customer needs and leave all the tasks to BenF! Should we take a try? :slight_smile:

It’s nice to see that you’re finding the Nano useful for field work.

The idea with the current scheme is to get creative with numbers. One example would be to dedicate a range of numbers to specific measuring tasks. This could be ignition 100, injection 200 and so forth. Waveforms and matching profiles would then share the same sequence number or you may opt to use a single profile for a series of reference waveforms (e.g. profile 100 is good for waveforms 100 to 110 and so on).

I’m afraid a file manager type feature might obscure the user interface and become more of a curiosity (meaning - yes it is possible, but …) than an appreciated feature. Still it may be a good enhancement to allow alpha characters in file names. We would then use our computers to assign more meaningful names (8 characters + extension) to files.

How about offering the public (BenF or anyone else willing) money instead for features you would like to add to your product but can’t do yourself? Is there any budget for anything like that? Make votes on the forum for most wanted features and set a amount of money for each based on the ranking and complexity of the task.

If feedback given in this forum is representative, I would say you’re doing just fine. You now have an attractive piece of hardware in the DSO Nano and a good firmware to go along with it. This has come about as a result of your open source policy and hosting of this forum to enable sharing ideas, upload/download software/documentation and assist with issues. You seem to attract satisfied buyers from all over the world and that’s certainly something you can be proud of.

Being pragmatic, I would say we’re approaching the limit to how much further the DSO Nano can be improved as a general purpose DSO. Taking it to another level would require new/redesigned hardware. For a DSO this might be dual channel input and significantly higher bandwidth (Quad may be an answer to this) and a proper logic analyzer would require different connectors with multiple digital inputs. Both of which would require redesigned hardware. What we have however is just fine for a large range of measuring tasks and now available for all customers to use.

There may still be an untapped potential with the Nano for special purpose firmwares such as automotive diagnostics and audio analysis. Adding such features to the current V3 firmware however is at best challenging (RAM is an issue) and more than likely this would come at the expense of general purpose functionality and ease of use for the average user. Perhaps all that is really required from Seeed in this respect is continued support of the forum.

Seeed is benefited a lot from the community for DSO nano, we are working on better ways of appreciating the contributions.

Candidates: 0) cash 1) donations, 2) paid app download 3) commercial usage royalties or 4) consultancy.

Surely we can offer bounties to finish the hot items on wish list. But direct cash might not be the most pleasant way, open source contributions are too hard to be measured by pure money and some people might feel uncomfortable on our offering.

In the alternative way, we are trying to add some authorization system into the devices. It could generate a APP market. We could list the firmware in our online store as a product. Paid downloading or free with donation link.

Also, People could make applications targeting special markets, even professional markets. We would involve the contributor as the co-developer and share the profit, or forward the contractor to corresponding developers.

How do you guys think? Thanks! :slight_smile:

I hope I don’t get shouted down for introducing any commercialism into the NANO software upgrades. I would be happy to make a donation or a small fee for apps (£2 or less). I would like to see the money going partly to SEEED for hosting the code and to the developer - although since most software is based on previous developments, this might be difficult to apportion. We can all see that BenF would be a worthy benefactor since he has considerably upgraded the NANO. Does anyone know how the Android app market works?
Tony

I’m concerned that an “authorization system” would consume precious system RAM, and, hence, reduce functionality… other than that, I can see focused firmware versions for specific markets, tasks, etc.

Hi BenF and others,

Is it possible to turn the Nano in a multi tool?
I mean this: is it possible on startup to display a menu with (at this point) 2 menu’s options

  1. skoop
  2. freq. counter.

a freq. counter with a 1 hz resolution would be nice !

(Sorry for my English, this is not my native language)

I’m not sure how to read this. If I just say - Yes - none of us is any wiser.

There is a menu today where you can select frequency as measurment and this will turn the Nano into a Frequency Counter. If you shift the menu position down two steps it becomes a Voltmeter. How is this different from what you had in mind?

Hi Ben,

I mean it like this:
There is a menu option at startup, you don’t see the scope layout , but for instance only "Frequency : "and 6-8? big digits.

Perhaps he was wishing you could turn off the trace and expand the text of the measurements so it looks like a multimeter? The screen is big enough that you could have all of the measurements on the screen at once in large type? Kinda a “zoom” function on the present “me” all display menu selection?

That’s what I’d like to see anyways :slight_smile: .

EDIT> Oops, looks like we were both posting at the same time :smiley: .

BenF

I think that would be an excellent idea to make the Nano more useful. If you make it available, I’ll make a video tutorial of possible ways to use this feature. It would have immediate use in the automotive and hobby fields and it can remain transparent for those not interested.

If this were implemented and you are selecting a file on the Nano, what would be the scroll sequence with alpha characters included?

Thanks

This feature would provide the greatest benefit to those who need glasses but hate to wear them all the time. For ease of use they simply select Vpp for DC volts, Vrms for AC volts, Freq for frequency, etc.

Possible food for thought to implement this feature with minimized code impact. Because the present ME menu already displays the measurement selected at last pop-up at the top right of screen, it might be possible to add a “meter visible”/“meter hide” option on the ME pop-up menu. When the pop-up closes, the larger characters of the selected measurement value would overlay the screen (“meter visible”) and also still remain at it’s normal location (top right of screen). If they mistakenly close the ME pop-up with “meter visible” selected, then display “Select” for the ME results.

“Meter hide” would operate as it does now with no large characters.

If you used the same magenta color of the oversize characters as the waveform color, then the waveform could still update on the screen with minimal interference with the block style large characters. Otherwise you could just disable the waveform updates during “meter visible” mode.

Hi Ben

One small request would be to allow the arrow scrolling both left and right during the FI menu pop-up choices. This would allow getting to “s 800.bmp” much quicker.

Thanks

I would like to see 2 new things:
Keep up to date on the git repository or more often source downloads. It looks to me that the most recent version of the BenF source is 3.11. I am trying to find out what version is in that git repository.

More control over Frequency Out. For example with v3.40 I cannot get 847Hz. I would also like to either do a frequency sweep or read the frequencies and durations in from a file. I am trying to familiarize myself with the source to start adding that.
Thanks
Derek

Have you tried this?

Ben,
I will give that a try. I apologize if I totally missed that in the readme.
Thanks for the quick reply
Derek