Now that I actually have a unit, I can give a bit more detail in the review.

As I stated previously, the hardware specs are the best I’ve seen. While I definitely could use more than 32 channels, it gets the job done for most projects. The triggering works well, and the amount of sample storage on device cannot be beat.

I found that the UI is still lackluster. I have three main gripes.

First, they still don’t allow more than 6 markers. I don’t understand why they cannot allow as many as the user wants. It just seems silly. This makes it difficult to keep track and mark events in data streams such as I2C or SPI. The best way I’ve found to mitigate this is to use the search feature to help identify the data patterns I’m looking for and leave a few markers behind as I search.

Second, the interface did take a bit of getting used to. Something that I didn’t know at first (I must have missed it in my first gloss through the manual) is that the buttons in the UI have different functions depending on whether you left-click or right click. It makes for a much simplified interface I suppose, but I’m not very fast, or very comfortable making multiple right-clicks in a row.

Finally, they have a “bird’s eye view” which shows the marker locations in the data. The problem is that the data set that I capture is usually so long that the cursors all appear on top of each other in the “bird’s eye window”. If I zoom into one cursor, then I cannot see the other cursors in the bird’s eye window. The window seems to autosize itself based on how far zoomed in you are in the data. I would rather the “bird’s eye view” have its own zoom controls. That way, I could size it as I like and keep track of where my cursors are relative to each other as I zoom in and out of the data on the main screen.

If they had fixed these 3 main issues, I would have bought one 2 years ago. The 6 markers issue was a real deal killer for me. However, I recently was butting heads at work when multiple people needed our old Agilent logic analyzer. I took a brief survey of the market, and the digi-view still seemed the best choice hardware wise.

All that said, the UI does have a lot of great features (much of which I’ve not used yet).

Lots of different built in protocols (still no CAN bus) make data analysis easy.

The digiview has the capability of multiple captures events, in which each capture fills up one set of data within a project. The default upon installation is that each capture is saved in your working project, so that after 10 captures you have 10 data sets. I quickly disabled that feature once I figured it out, as it doesn’t agree with the way I usually do things. It could be useful for strange events that are particularly difficult to reproduce though. You can even search through the data sets for the event, which is pretty cool. The only problem is that it seems to loose data in between triggers in this mode. Probably because they didn’t leave any spare buffer space to allow them to keep accumulating data while the current data is sent up USB.

They also have a table view that allows you to view protocol data (such as I2C) in table form. This looks interesting, but I’ve not investigated it thoroughly.

If anyone is thinking of purchasing a digi-view, note that the cables can be purchased independently of the unit on the tech-tools website, or on digikey. It is worth picking up a couple of sets, as you don’t want to have to disassemble your connections on one piece of hardware when you suddenly need to hook it up to another setup.

[...]Efficient C Tips #10 – Use unsigned integers « Stack Overflow[...]…

This does not mean Y cannot obfuscate, secure, or even boobytrap his ideas to prevent external use. It also does not mean X can trespass, burgle, or breach contracts to obtain Y’s ideas. Commercialization of ideas should rest solely on Y’s ability to satisfy the wants of consumers, not his ability to strong arm government and bureaucracy to acquire special protection from competition.

More reading: http://mises.org/books/against.pdf

The problem is that it’s very difficult to do anything, at least in China.

Another type of theft is with dual license open source code, where it can be GPL (release the modifications) or commercial (keep your modifications). In that case, many companies do not bother, although some will obfuscate the code (e.g. rename functions) to avoid potential legal issues.

#include

unsigned uabs(int x)
{
return (unsigned) (x >= 0 ? x : -x);
}

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
int i = -4;

if (i/uabs(3 – 5) >= 0)
{
printf(“Answer is +ve\n”);
}
else
{
printf(“Answer is -ve\n”);
}

return 0;
}

prints “Answer is +ve”, although you might expect -4/2 to be negative. The usual arithmetic conversions promote i to unsigned int, meaning the expression is never negative.