I am in the process of building an ultrasonic imaging lab. One of the main challenges to consistently overcome is connecting standalone units (such as a digital oscilloscope, ultrasonic pulse generator, 3-axis motion controller, etc.) to a central personal computer (PC). Furthermore, once these units are connected to a PC, you then must make them communicate with them via a custom program. In this post we will not get into interfacing all the components together with a custom program. I will write about that journey in another post. But I will share my steps that I took to connect a digital oscilloscope to a PC with an ethernet cable. There are a few videos on YouTube and the link to the one I used can be found in this link here. There are also a couple of instructional posts on the internet (linked here) but none were specific to my setup. So, I figured this post will at least help those out there with a similar setup or can help with other oscilloscope configurations because the process is about the same across all platforms.
The digital oscilloscope that I have is a LeCroy WaveSurfer 3034z. First, you want to locate the ethernet port on both your PC and oscilloscope. Once they are located, plug in an ethernet cable into both ports. After the ethernet cable is plugged into the PC and oscilloscope, locate the menu button on the oscilloscope. Next, press the menu button and navigate the IP settings of the oscilloscope. Then, manually change the IP address on the oscilloscope. You may have to consult your manual to find the base IP settings for your particular IP address settings. For example, my oscilloscope’s base IP settings were: 172.XXX.XXX.
For the purposes of this example, I will use Windows 10. Transition to your PC and go into the “Network and Sharing Center”. Click on the “Ethernet” hyperlink on the right side of the Network and Sharing window. After the “Ethernet” link is clicked a pop up window will appear titled “Ethernet Status”. Click on the “Details…” box and it will direct you to your PC’s Network Connection Details. These details will inform you on the IPv4 Address of your PC currently. Make note of them because you will have to manually change the IPv4 Address to make the connection to the oscilloscope. Next, go back to the “Ethernet Status” window and click the “Properties” box. From there scroll down to the “Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4)” item and highlight it by clicking on it once. After it is highlighted, the “Properties” button will become available, click on it to manually change the PC’s IPv4 address. Change the IP address to an address of your choosing. For my oscilloscope model and PC, I kept to a similar convention of the oscilloscope.
After the IPs of the oscilloscope and PC have been changed, you can now test the connection to see if the oscilloscope and PC can talk to each other. You can do this by going to the command line, click on the windows icon on the bottom left of your screen and either type “run” or “command prompt”. You will be greeted with the window terminal command prompt. After it shows on your PC, type “ping (insert your oscilloscope’s IP address here)”. You should see replies from the oscilloscopes IP. Then, you can complete the interaction between the two units by typing “ping (insert your PC’s IP address here)”. If this is done correctly you should see replies from the PC.
Once you have done all these steps you have successfully connected your oscilloscope to your PC. If your oscilloscope has a feature where you can access the front panel via remote access, you can manipulate all buttons on your oscilloscope from the computer. My unit does not have this feature so I mainly use it to record the data from the oscilloscope in real time to my PC. This is useful in my current setup because I will need this data for post-processing on a custom program.
I hope you found this post helpful and as always thank you for your time!
–DB PhD