Re: [sigrok-devel] [PATCH] Third version of Rigol DS2xx2 support

[Damir J. <po...@mo...>]

On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 11:09:10PM +0100, Christoph Zimmermann wrote:
> 
> > > But I'm concerned that down the line, somebody comes along with an
> > > SCPI device that is substantially different in some way we haven't
> > > thought of. It's still an SCPI device so they extend the
> > > abstraction to cover it, which complicates it a little more, and
> > > then something else comes along and does the same thing, and
> > > something else again, and suddenly rather than "hey all the code I
> > > need is written already!" the next new developer is thinking "how
> > > the hell am I supposed to adapt this driver to work for my device?
> > > And without breaking all these other devices I don't have acess to
> > > to test against?"
> > > 
> > > Yes, right now this is a straw man argument, but my point is a
> > > general one: over-generalising things before all potential use
> > > cases are known often leads to architectures that cause problems
> > > later.
> > 
> > This seems to be unlikely (as I already mentioned I did look at the
> > Agilent programming guide) because manufacturers as well want to
> > standardise the commands, I saw some cases where they market their
> > devices as "Agilent" compatible with regard to the programming
> > interface, but ok, better safe then sorry.
> 
> An example I know are the oscilloscopes from Tektronix. I own a
> TDS3012B with Ethernet. For doing simple stuff and testing commands you
> can type them directely into the website provided by the internal
> webserver.
> 
> Playing around with it, I realized that Tek is unsing the same commands
> and command structure as described in SCPI, but using different
> namespaces or leaving away the namespace completely. That makes them
> SCPI similar but incompatible...
> 
> If you have a Tek account you can the the programmers manual here (or
> write me a PM):
> http://www.tek.com/oscilloscope/tds3014b-manual/tds3000-tds3000b-tds3000c-series
> 

I'm aware of the slight differences between the SCPI commands of
different vendors and I have so far successfully worked around them:
    https://github.com/poljar/libsigrok/blob/710ab4af4f9a32161173245de7b44b3b787578fa/hardware/hameg-serial/protocol.c#L33

Shame that Tektronix explicitly forbids redistribution of their manual,
would be nice to have them on the wiki.

Thanks for the info anyways, Damir.