If you want to do a good job, you have to make good use of the instruments first.

The company has some high-end instruments whose price may be up to 10000USD, but colleagues are just simply use them, manually adjust the knob, look at the waveform, and then manually write down the measurement data.

I think these instruments are provided with a serial port, network cable and other communication interfaces, and open control protocols.

Now that we have entered the AI era, artificial intelligence is forcing us to improve our work efficiency, and in this time of fierce competition, if we stick to traditional practices and do not think about making progress, both companies and individuals will lose their competitiveness.

Therefore, they should be connected to a computer and a test script should be written in Python to automate data testing, collection and analysis.

Using AI programming tools, you can basically just type in some keywords to automatically generate Python code.

For example, recently we were testing the frequency response characteristics as well as the input impedance of a signal receiving circuit;

What our hardware colleagues did was to
Use a signal generator to adjust the knob to step at certain frequency intervals to generate a swept signal, use an oscilloscope to test the voltage amplitude of the signal at different parts of the receiving circuit, record it, and then input it into excel to analyze the data;

I told them that they should study the communication interface of these instruments and write a piece of Python code with the computer to realize the test and analysis as well; and they should study the communication interface of these instruments and write a piece of Python code to simplify the work,
They said writing code is for software engineers.

I said that now is the AI era, as the excellent system engineers who are experts in various fields should know more or less code, Python is also very simple and easy to understand, and some Python scripts for daily work can greatly improve work efficiency;

I couldn't convince them, so I had to do it myself, and used the host computer to control the oscilloscope and signal generator to do some tests on the receiver circuit.

Connecting the signal generator to the computer through the RS232 interface, and connecting the oscilloscope to the computer through the network cable.
Send serial commands to control the frequency and amplitude of the output signal according to the protocol of the signal generator.
Use pyvisa to control the oscilloscope to adjust the time base and amplitude, control the automatic measurement and read back the data;
Then use octave to analyze the data and plot the curve;

All in one go, the total time spent less than an hour, most of the code is to enter the keyword after the AI automatically generated, I just do the mover, in fact, there is not much code.