Master your Rig(ol) from command line

Description

Does any of your oscilloscope(s), power supplie(s), signal generator(s), etc. have LXI capability? If yes, then you can remotely control your instruments from a computer.

LXI is a communication standard. LXI can send and receive SCPI commands. SCPI commands are text commands that can control or interrogate your lab instruments.

Because LXI standard is using normal TCP/IP packets, it will work with any OS, and without any special drivers for your laboratory instruments. All you need is an LXI instrument and it's programming manual.

To send SCPI commands straight from the command line, over LAN, you can use 'NetCat' (AKA 'nc'). NetCat is a standard command line tool that can talk TCP/IP. Usually, NetCat is used for network debugging. Here, NetCat will be used to control lab instruments.

What commands can be sent?
Many, but each instrument know it's own commands. RTFM.

A Rigol DS1104Z Oscilloscope and a Rigol DP832 Power Supply were used here as an example.

Details

How to control an LXI instrument without any drivers:

Connect your instrument to your LAN
Ping the instrument IP to check the network.
Open a command line and fire a NetCat instance (type 'nc'). If you are on Linux, 'netcat' or 'nc' is already installed with all the other network tools. On Windows, you need to download NetCat for Windows.
Type 'nc 192.168.1.3 5555', where 5555 or 5566 is the port number for any Rigol LXI instrument. '192.168.1.3' is the IP of my oscilloscope. You should use the IP of your instrument, not this one.
In the NetCat, type: '*IDN?'. The instrument will respond with it's IDentification Name.
You are now connected with your instrument. Send any commands you like.
Have more then one instrument? Open another NetCat in another command line, one for each instrument.
To see a list with all the available commands, open the programming manual of your instruments.

Example:

To take a screenshot from a Rigol oscilloscope (e.g. DS1054Z) and save it to the PC, connect the oscilloscope and the PC to the same LAN, open a Linux terminal and just type this:

echo ":DISPLAY:DATA? ON,OFF,PNG" | nc -w1 192.168.32.208 5555  | dd bs=1 skip=11 of=image.png

Don't forget to replace "192.168.32.208" with the IP of your own oscilloscope. A PNG file named 'image.png' will be saved on the PC. If you open the saved PNG file, you will see a capture from the oscilloscope's screen.

This is also a very nice example for the beauty and the power of command line piping. The author of this very elegant example is S Clark.

Components

1 × LXI enabled instrument(s) Any laboratory instrument with LXI

1 × LAN connection Local Area Network

1 × PC PC with LAN connection

Discussions

Bits4Bots wrote 08/08/2021 at 23:54

Thank you. I was able to send SCPI commands to my Rigol DS1054Z using the Zenmap GUI. The settings that worked for me was the Static IP 192.168.1.102 (DHCP and Auto IP off) as the user manual suggest for VISA (Virtual Instrument Software Architecture), developed by NI (National Instrument).

Rigol User Manual: DG800 Series Function/Arbitrary Waveform Generator page 2-94

Are you sure? yes | no

johndetrick wrote 07/29/2019 at 07:56

These slight changes work great for the RIGOL DSA 815 Spectrum Analyzer!!

echo ":PRIV:SNAP? BMP" | nc -w3 192.168.88.64 5555 | dd bs=1 skip=11 of=image.bmp

-First, we use the :PRIV:SNAP? BMP command that is used inside the fantastic Rigol Bildschirmkopie LAN/USB capture utility via the VXI-11 protocol to initiate the transfer on the DSA.

The command happens to be available also on the SCPI port, 5555 as a SCPI command with the very same syntax though it is not in RIGOL's Programming documentation.

-Second, the argument for nc needs to have more time, -w3 - to give it three seconds.

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Master your Rig(ol) from command line

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