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Tabor WW1071 AWG trouble

I've been trying to load waveforms into a Tabor WW1071 signal generator, without success. I can talk to the thing over ethernet, sending SCPI commands and reading back the (few) responses. I have no problem to make it put out the standard built-in waveforms, but when I try to load my own waveforms, I get nowhere. Often I even crash the thing, requiring a power cycle before it will accept a new TCP connection.

I've tried several code snippets found in the documentation, piping the data into the AWG through telnet or netcat, but to no avail. One big problem is that the instrument returns very little information about its internal state. Erroneous commands produce no error returns. Comparing it to similar devices from reputable manufacturers, lots of commands to read out internal state or data are missing. It's mostly a write-only black box. It's a shameful piece of work, really.

Can somebody offer any hints?

Thanks, Jeroen Belleman

Reply to
Jeroen Belleman
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Have you contacted them about it?

They have a ton of documents so you have to become a sort of ownwer's club member to get them:

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Last firmware update was 2010. Is yours up to date?

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

No, I didn't. I might try it yet, but I expect them to tell me to RTFM.

Yes, another site that wants you to sell your soul in exchange for docs. I have the docs. I even read them.

Should that matter? It's supposed to work as stated, no? I won't touch the firmware unless there's an imperative to do so, and probably not even then. I'm more likely to solve my problem without that box then.

Jeroen Belleman

Reply to
Jeroen Belleman

Jeroen, don't be weird. Of course you want the version with all the software fixed. For most of us, it's one of the first things we do.

--
 Thanks, 
    - Win
Reply to
Winfield Hill

Speaking as someone who's successfully updated the firmware of thousands of various devices, this is generally good advice. In the interest of full disclosure, the slight risk that a firmware update will brick a device must also be noted. Fortunately, in the few cases where a firmware update bricked a device on me, either a chip or a board replacement resurrected the device most of the time. Keep in mind that it's harder to find parts for exotic devices on ebay. "Exotic" in this case is self-referential. If it's not available on ebay it's exotic by definition.

Thank you, 73,

--
Don Kuenz KB7RPU 
There was a young lady named Bright Whose speed was far faster than light; 
She set out one day In a relative way And returned on the previous night.
Reply to
Don Kuenz

But this is preposterous! The device is sold as an AWG. If that functionality isn't available as sold, it's *broken* and should never have been sold as such! There may be new functionality or subtle bug fixes in an upgrade, but something as basic as this should work.

I found that it wants a bit of delay between commands, which it doesn't get when I pipe a prepared file of commands and data into it. The manual doesn't say so and the TCP protocol is supposed to protect against that, so that's a bug. OK, I can work around that, but it doesn't seem to be the whole story.

Jeroen Belleman

Reply to
Jeroen Belleman

It's normal, at least these days. A typical scenario would be that a boss is breathing down the engineer's neck to "get it done, soon". Then it is all released to production in a hurry and later there is an oops discovered here and there. Hence, if someone gets stuck like you did a firmware update would be the first thing I'd do if it's a newer version than you have.

Granted I didn't do that (yet) for a digital scope here but that's because it works well enough for the jobs I need it for.

An example of the benefits of SW updates: Until it died during a Linux install a month ago my wife had a little Dell Inspiron 1000 laptop. It was always sluggish with video playback. Several years after (!) Dell terminated production of this laptop a new graphics driver came out for the by then rather old graphics IC. It was like a flood gate opening, suddenly video worked very smoothly and fast.

Since you own one of their devices it makes sense to register on the site. That way they can notify you when there are issues or when a new firmware is available. It also can't hurt to contact them via email or phone. Most likely someone else had similar problems and maybe they know a solution.

Yeah, they might pester you with marketing campaigns but one can mostly opt out of that.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

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