From time to time I have shared here on “Watt’s Up?” a
number of different ways the system DC power supply in your test set up impacts
your test time, and recommendations on how to make significant improvements in the
test throughput. Many of these previous posts are based on the first five of
ten hints I’ve put together in a compendium entitled “10 Hints on Improving
Throughput with your Power Supply” (click here for hints 1-5).
Oscilloscopes, data acquisition, and a variety of other
test equipment are often used to capture and digitize waveforms and store large
arrays of data during test, the data is then downloaded to a PC. These data
arrays can be quite large, from thousands to millions of measurements. For
long-term data logging the data files can be many gigabytes in size. These data
files can take considerable time to transfer over an instrument bus, greatly
impacting your test time.
Advanced system power supplies incorporating digitizing
measurement systems to capture waveform measurements like inrush current are no
different. This includes a number of system DC and AC power products we
provide. Even though you usually have the choice of transferring data in ASCII
format, one thing we recommend is instead transfer data in binary format.
Binary data transmission requires fewer bytes reducing transfer time by a
factor of two or more.
Further details about using binary mode data transfers
can be found in hint 7 of another, earlier compendium we did, entitled “10
hints for using your power supply to decrease test time” (click here to
access). Between these two compendiums of hints for improving your test
throughput I expect you should be able find a few different ideas that will
benefit your particular test situation!
