camera trick

It does, but it's a nuisance to enable/disable, and the time delay is inconveniently long.

Oh. Well, mine is a bit of a PITA in that after you take a shot you have to re-enable it again, but it's only 3 button presses. The time can be set to 2, 5, or 10 seconds.

That's the next thing I need to get. The extender cable for the sampling head.

BTW, I am still trying to track down some upgraded firmware for my 11802. I did find that the Display Controller is good at V9.00 so yours is good for that and it is the same firmware in the 11801. If I can locate the Timebase Controller firmware for the 802, I'll let you know. I'm sure that will clear up that error you are seeing.

I did converse with Dr. Hobbs and he is a bit leery in disturbing his unit due to critical projects he has underway.

I tried the firmware from the 11801 in the timebase controller and it will not work.

The error warning doesn't seem to cause any problems. That scope does handle all the heads I have: SD22, 24, 26, 14, 30.

I call him Phil and he doesn't seem to mind.

I'd expect that the 11801 and 11802 code is different, since the '02 has the delay lines and their trigger pickoffs.

I'd love to find some retired Tek guy who knows about these scopes, and maybe even has schematics.

We got a 40 GHz head, SD30 I think, recently. That's under 10 ps risetime. It's hard to get signals through connectors and cables and attenuators at that speed.

I just got a pristine SD14 with all the goodies, ebay, $175. This series of gear keeps getting cheaper... a few percent of what new stuff would cost. Between ebay and Digikey, anyone can get into picosecond electronics.

Powerpoint can let you down at crucial moments. For one job interview they asked me to present a project I had made in the past... On one slide all the pictures magically got upside down.

Tektronix used to put "Tekdoodles" into their schematics, like a guy on skis schussing down a Miller ramp.

I hate PowerPoint. And presentations in general. When I visit a potential customer, I ask questions and listen. I wouldn't pretend to understand their needs before I go there.

I visited one potential customer who had about 30 engineers and managers gathered in a huge conference room, and me. I'd scribbled some private notes on the bumpy plane ride, just scrawls on grid paper, and one of their guys saw them, grabbed them, and made them into overhead slides, which were then presented to everyone. They bought it, a multichannel ARB, and I've sold hundreds since. I think most people prefer authentic, hand-drawn stuff to PowerPoint. And most people prefer to talk than to listen, so I try to get them talking, and I stay quiet until I understand what's going on. PowerPoint shuts everything down, including talking and thinking. It's like watching TV.

I gave up on PowerPoint many years ago. I do all my presentations and design reviews with Adobe Acrobat. I can create navigable hierarchical schematics in a PDF that behave just like "push" and "pop" do in my schematic capture... makes it duck soup to explain a chip to a customer. ...Jim Thompson

Not at all. Some tasks work well with command line image editing programs. Allows me to do batch or wild card processing. Nconvert and ExifTool are other handy command line utilities.

I sense a Dilbert moment:

But if I want to crop an image, or futz with the color balance or gamma or something, I sure don't want to iterate command lines. I want to crop with the mouse, and tune the image with sliders, in real time.

Command lines make sense for a folder full of images, like "reduce all the jpegs to 800x600" or some such. Irfanview will do that too.

That looks quite similar to what I tried. Anyway I think I'll hack a truly simple USB GPIB interface together (and maybe turn that into a product).

On a sunny day (Fri, 18 May 2012 09:25:15 -0700) it happened qrk wrote in :

Right, Imagemagick is a standard. I use it all the time.

On a sunny day (Fri, 18 May 2012 09:38:59 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Look up imagemagic

You can already buy those (I did). This kind:

There are already a lot of them on the market. Ebay has them starting at under US 70$. Even Agilent has them.

Depends on how it's presented. When I present in design reviews I try to spice it up with some live simulator runs. But more importantly I tell the audience to please ask questions right when the respective slide comes up instead of waiting until the end of the show. That keeps a lively discussion going.

But we are all too spoiled when it comes to technology. Once there was a major winterstorm at a client. In the distance big blue flashes, those were major power lines where the wires did a tarantella dance and occasionally touched (!). I had never seen that before, very spooky. Then the inevitable happened ... thwock ... wheeeooouuuu ... everyhting in the large company building came to a halt, no more power. Of course this included the central air and after a couple hours people got headaches from the stuffy air. "S..t! We need to get this block diagram hammered out today" one of them said. I had a big apartment at one of those extended stay places, with fireplace. So we mounted a couple of cars and headed out there, the guys in the van carried an easel with whiteboard and some pens. On the way we picked up a small load of firewood, candles, a few six-packs, pretzels and it became one of the most productive meetings ever.

I suspect most of the USB versions are slow because they use a seperate USB-UART converter chip and/or slow microcontroller. I know the Prologix converters do (FTDI USB-serial). Same for the $66 converter on Ebay.

A typical color image from my TDS744 is close to 400kB so speed is essential. Someone elso mentioned using the serial port but at

Yikes! Why did Tek do that? When I store a pic from my Instek GDS-2204 scope is takes a couple of seconds or so, and they use a USB-serial protocol (but I believe 115kbaud). The HP-3577 also transfers a pristine plot to the lab computer via the Prologix adapter in seconds, using the GPIB connection in the back which is the only port to cyberspace it has. This machine is almost 30 years old.

get some 0.8mm sheet steel (or 3mm acrylic sheet) and bend it into a C shape that accomodates the camera drill a hole for the tripod mount screw to pass through and another hole above the shutter button to take a cable release.