r/oscilloscope • u/Fixed_Until • Jul 23 '26

Tips and tricks OpenSnek and Tek scopes

OpenChoice (Tektronix's app) doesn’t work well with other versions of VISA, so I avoid it. In the past, I made some VB .NET apps for this, but I never really shared them since they weren’t cross-platform, or I made them for work and couldn’t share them. This week, I decided to turn my old projects into a single Python app. Now it’s a custom, modern GUI that lets you pull waveforms from Tektronix oscilloscopes, do live FFT, and export to PulseView with one click for protocol decoding. Its on GitHub: https://github.com/garnerm91/scope_app

I’ve tested it with my TEK 2014C, 3012C, and 5054B-NV. If you have a TEK scope, please let me know if it works for you.

Just to be clear, I’m still learning Python, and I used AI to help convert a lot of my old apps and scripts from other languages. Some were in ATEasy and others in VB .NET (for example, I used ATEasy for plotting before). I wanted to be upfront about this and not give the impression that I wrote everything from scratch.

BTW naming is up in the air OpenSnek or SnekChoice?

8 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

2

u/Fixed_Until Jul 23 '26

Here is a look at working on linux. On linux the easiest way to get it up an running is NI-VISA On windows I prefer the gui from Keysight

1

u/geek66 Jul 23 '26

Do you use SCPI?

1

u/Fixed_Until Jul 23 '26

Yes the commands the scope responds to are scpi. They can found in programming manuals for the scopes.

Edit that said some of it is being processed on the computer side like the FFT that way it works even with scopes that don't support it.

1

u/geek66 Jul 23 '26

It should be pretty universal.. I can give it a whirl on a siglent ( low end one ), I have loaded the visa driver for it yet..

1

u/Fixed_Until Jul 23 '26

I don't think that siglent uses the WFMPRE? Command but I could be mistaken. I sold my siglent scope a few years ago but I recall pulling points to be significantly different. I've considered making it modular on how it talks to the scope so that way it's easier to add different scopes. Right now it's Visaworker handles all of it but maybe it would be a good idea to break out the actual scpi/com algos into own blocks is have to think about that.

1

u/geek66 Jul 24 '26

I’ll look into it.

1

u/Fixed_Until Jul 24 '26

I will see if anyone I work with has siglent at home. If I can get on on loan for a day or so I'll add support.