Pico Technology is a British manufacturer of high-precision PC-based oscilloscopes and automotive diagnostics equipment, founded in 1991.About Pico
Pico Technology Their product range includes the ''PicoScope'' line of PC-based

oscilloscope An oscilloscope (informally a scope) is a type of electronic test instrument that graphically displays varying electrical voltages as a two-dimensional plot of one or more signals as a function of time. The main purposes are to display repetiti ...

data logger A data logger (also datalogger or data recorder) is an electronic device that records data over time or about location either with a built-in instrument or sensor or via external instruments and sensors. Increasingly, but not entirely, they a ...

s, automotive equipment, and most recently,

handheld A mobile device (or handheld computer) is a computer small enough to hold and operate in the hand. Mobile devices typically have a flat LCD or OLED screen, a touchscreen interface, and digital or physical buttons. They may also have a physical ...

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad v ...

-based oscilloscopes.History
Pico Technology Since their inception in 1991, Pico Tech has been researching and developing PC-based oscilloscopes, when the market standard was analogue storage oscilloscopes. Pico Technology is one of two European scope manufacturers, and competes in the low to middle end of the instrumentation market. Pico Technology won

The Queen's Award for Enterprise The King's Awards for Enterprise, previously known as The Queen's Awards for Enterprise, is an awards programme for British businesses and other organizations who excel at international trade, innovation, sustainable development or promoting oppo ...

in 2014 (International Trade), and was named a "Key player" in the ''Global Electronic Test & Measurement Instruments Market'' by ''Global Industry Analysts''. Their equipment is considered "a modern alternative to traditional and costly bench-top test and measurement equipment", and that they "cost a fraction of traditional automotive oscilloscopes and engine analyzers". The ''PicoScope 5000'' variable resolution USB-based oscilloscope was voted as the ''Test & Measurement Product of the Year'' at Elektra Awards 2013, presented by

Electronics Weekly ''Electronics Weekly'' is a weekly trade journal for electronics professionals which was first published by Reed Business Information on 7 September 1960. It was the first British Electronics newspaper and its founding editor was Cyril C. Gee who ...

at Lancaster, London. The series also won the DesignVision 2014 award for ''Test and Measurement Equipment'', presented by UBM Tech Electronics at the DesignCon 2014 trade show. The ''Pico Automotive Diagnostic Kit'' was chosen as the ''Top 20 Tools of 2003'' by Motor magazine,Top Shelf Tools 2003
MOTOR Magazine the ''Top Product of 2005'' by Commercial Vehicles Workshop magazine, the ''Top Product of 2002'' and ''Top Product of 2003'' by Professional Motor Mechanic magazine, and their ''FirstLook Sensor'' won an ''Innovation Award'' by Professional Tool & Equipment News in 2004.

Products

All PicoScope models include an integrated

function generator In electrical engineering, a function generator is usually a piece of electronic test equipment or software used to generate different types of electrical waveforms over a wide range of frequencies. Some of the most common waveforms produced b ...

arbitrary waveform generator An arbitrary waveform generator (AWG) is a piece of electronic test equipment used to generate electrical waveforms. These waveforms can be either repetitive or single-shot (once only) in which case some kind of triggering source is required (i ...

, triggering, automatic measurements with statistics, a

Fast Fourier transform A fast Fourier transform (FFT) is an algorithm that computes the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of a sequence, or its inverse (IDFT). Fourier analysis converts a signal from its original domain (often time or space) to a representation in th ...

spectrum analysis mode, waveform maths, mask limit testing, and serial decoding for

I2C I, or i, is the ninth letter and the third vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''i'' (pronounced ), plural ...

, SPI,

UART A universal asynchronous receiver-transmitter (UART ) is a computer hardware device for asynchronous serial communication in which the data format and transmission speeds are configurable. It sends data bits one by one, from the least significan ...

CAN Can may refer to: Containers * Aluminum can * Drink can * Oil can * Steel and tin cans * Trash can * Petrol can * Metal can (disambiguation) Music * Can (band), West Germany, 1968 ** ''Can'' (album), 1979 * Can (South Korean band) Other * C ...

LIN Lin or LIN may refer to: People *Lin (surname) (normally ), a Chinese surname *Lin (surname) (normally 蔺), a Chinese surname * Lin (''The King of Fighters''), Chinese assassin character *Lin Chow Bang, character in Fat Pizza Places *Lin, Iran, ...

and FlexRay.

USB 2.0 Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad v ...

oscilloscopes from Pico Tech are available with bandwidths up to 1 GHz, up to 4 input channels, hardware vertical resolutions up to 16 bits,

sampling rate In signal processing, sampling is the reduction of a continuous-time signal to a discrete-time signal. A common example is the conversion of a sound wave to a sequence of "samples". A sample is a value of the signal at a point in time and/or spac ...

s up to 5 GS/s, buffer sizes up to 2 GS, and built-in

signal generator A signal generator is one of a class of electronic devices that generates electrical signals with set properties of amplitude, frequency, and wave shape. These generated signals are used as a stimulus for electronic measurements, typically used i ...

USB 3.0 USB 3.0, released in November 2008, is the third major version of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard for interfacing computers and electronic devices. Among other improvements, USB 3.0 adds the new transfer rate referred to as '' ...

SuperSpeed oscilloscopes from Pico Tech offers up to 500 MHz bandwidth (1.25Gsample/s) on four channels, and 2 GS of buffer memory shared between the channels.Cypress’s EZ-USB® FX3™ Controller Powers Industry’s First USB 3.0 Oscilloscopes from Pico Technology

BusinessWire Business Wire is an American company that disseminates full-text press releases from thousands of companies and organizations worldwide to news media, financial markets, disclosure systems, investors, information web sites, databases, bloggers, s ...

, 17 April 2013 Pico Tech has been variously credited for developing the world's first USB 3.0 PC-based oscilloscope. The ''PicoScope 6000'' series is considered a "Deep-memory oscilloscope", and uses hardware acceleration to provide fast display update rates on the PC.PicoScope 6000 Series
Deep-memory high-performance USB scopes, Pico Tech WebsiteThe Preferred Method for Electronic Test
R&D Magazine, 8 June 2014, Lindsay Hock, Managing Editor The 6000 Series hardware acceleration engine can process up to 5 billion

samples per second In signal processing, sampling is the reduction of a continuous-time signal to a discrete-time signal. A common example is the conversion of a sound wave to a sequence of "samples". A sample is a value of the signal at a point in time and/or s ...

, approximately two-orders-of-magnitude faster than what could be processed on a typical PC CPU. The ''PicoScope 9000'' series of "sampling scopes" are noted to reach a 12 GHz and even 20 GHz

, and are often used for analysing electrical communications standards and mainstream signal integrity (SI).PicoScope 9000 Series sampling oscilloscopes
Pico Tech Website Such oscilloscopes work in conjunction with the PicoScope PC software that supports 70+ serial standards including

RapidIO The RapidIO architecture is a high-performance packet-switched electrical connection technology. RapidIO supports messaging, read/write and cache coherency semantics. Based on industry-standard electrical specifications such as those for Ethern ...

PCI Express PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common ...

and

Serial ATA SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard t ...

. The ''PicoScope Advanced Automotive Diagnostics Kit'' enables testing of ignition, injectors and fuel pumps, starter and charging circuits, batteries, alternators, starter motors, and timer relays.Automotive Oscilloscope Kit turns PC into diagnostic tool

ThomasNet The ''Thomas Register of American Manufacturers'', now ThomasNet, is an online platform for supplier discovery and product sourcing in the US and Canada. It was once known as the "big green books" and "Thomas Registry", and was a multi-volume d ...

, 18 September 2014 The Kit is compatible with any vehicle make or model, and can measure and test virtually all electrical and electronic components and circuits. Power comes from USB port of PC so no batteries or power leads are required. The ''PicoLog'' range of data loggers includes various devices to periodically measure and record voltage, temperature, and power consumption data. The range includes the ''DrDAQ'' educational multi-function data logger, that has been described as "a greatly simplified version of the PicoScopes", and "can certainly be recommended to those involved in teaching computer interfacing, or wishing to use computer based equipment when demonstrating appropriate scientific experiments". Pico Technology offers passive and active oscilloscope probes up to 1.5 GHz, high-voltage and high-bandwidth differential voltage probes, current probes, thermocouples, accelerometers and pressure transducers.

PC software

The PicoScope PC software is provided free with every oscilloscope, and enables real-time signal acquisition and capture of waveforms on

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: ''Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All the ...

OpenSUSE openSUSE () is a free and open-source software, free and open source RPM Package Manager, RPM-based Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. The initial release of the community project was a beta version of SUSE Linux 10.0. Addi ...

and

MacOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

platforms.A USB scope for Linux fans
EDN Magazine, Christoph Hammerschmidt −19 February 2014 PicoScope software enables analysis using FFT, a

spectrum analyser A spectrum analyzer measures the magnitude of an input signal versus frequency within the full frequency range of the instrument. The primary use is to measure the power of the spectrum of known and unknown signals. The input signal that most co ...

, voltage-based triggers, and the ability to save/load waveforms to disk. PicoScope is compatible with

Parallel port In computing, a parallel port is a type of interface found on early computers (personal and otherwise) for connecting peripherals. The name refers to the way the data is sent; parallel ports send multiple bits of data at once ( parallel ...

oscilloscopes and the newer USB oscilloscopes. The software has been described as "very good for laptops" and can be used with desktop or laptop PCs. The Linux version has been described as "lightyears ahead fQpicoscope and other attempts at Linux scope software" and "well capable of replacing a professional benchtop scope". Beta versions of the software also work on the ARM-based

BeagleBone Black The BeagleBoard is a low-power open-source single-board computer produced by Texas Instruments in association with Digi-Key and Newark element14. The BeagleBoard was also designed with open source software development in mind, and as a way of de ...

and

Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi () is a series of small single-board computers (SBCs) developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in association with Broadcom. The Raspberry Pi project originally leaned towards the promotion of teaching basic ...

development hardware. PicoScope software enables real-time scope display with zooming and panning, and buffers captured waveforms on the PC to enable engineers to view previous measurements. PicoScope uses configurable triggers, which are available for digital and analogue waveforms. Triggers include pulse width, interval, window, window pulse width, level drop-out, window drop-out, runt pulse, variable hysteresis, and logic. Mixed signal variants combine digitised analogue triggers with edge and pattern triggering on the digital inputs. Screen size and resolution are unrestricted, and depend on the PC connected. For developers that require integration, PicoScope includes a free

software development kit A software development kit (SDK) is a collection of software development tools in one installable package. They facilitate the creation of applications by having a compiler, debugger and sometimes a software framework. They are normally specific to ...

(SDK) with that can be programmed from C#,

VB.NET Visual Basic, originally called Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET), is a multi-paradigm, object-oriented programming language, implemented on .NET, Mono, and the .NET Framework. Microsoft launched VB.NET in 2002 as the successor to its original Visua ...

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

Microsoft Excel Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows, Windows, macOS, Android (operating system), Android and iOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro (comp ...

LabVIEW Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench (LabVIEW) is a system-design platform and development environment for a visual programming language from National Instruments. The graphical language is named "G"; not to be confused with G-co ...

MATLAB MATLAB (an abbreviation of "MATrix LABoratory") is a proprietary multi-paradigm programming language and numeric computing environment developed by MathWorks. MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation ...

Products

PC software

References

See also