ScopeSaver 1.0 review

ScopeSaver is a little Cocoa application that can save and restore configurations to a Hewlett-Packard 1630 or 1631 series logic analyzer.

License: Freeware OS: Mac OS X File size: 138K Developer: Matthew Gelhaus Price: $0.00 Updated: 27 Oct 2005

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ScopeSaver is a little Cocoa application that can save and restore configurations to a Hewlett-Packard 1630 or 1631 series logic analyzer. These are very nice analyzers for the electronics hobbyist, but creating setups for them takes a long time and they do not store configurations internally. This application will read the current configuration, including signal names and assignments, and store them in an XML file on your Mac's hard drive for later reuse.

It communicates over an RS-232 serial port. My particular analyzer is an HP1631D, which has 5 pods and two analog scope channels. I have only tested it on my unit, but because it tailors the size of the configuration records stored to the connected scope, it should work with all of the following units:

HP1630A
HP1630D
HP1630G
HP1631A
HP1631D


Requirements:
Since this application uses a serial port, but the logic analyzer has a GPIB port, a converter is necessary.
I use a National Instruments GPIB-232CV-A serial-to-GPIB converter. My Powerbook doesn't have a serial port, though, so I also use a Keyspan USB-to-RS232 converter.
When this Keyspan converter is plugged in to one of my Powerbook's USB ports, the device file /dev/cu.USA191b1P1.1 is created. ScopeSaver detects serial ports on startup, so the Keyspan converter needs to be plugged in before starting the application.