Device groups are used to group several related properties. For example, a channel group might contain the input channels of an oscilloscope, and the properties and methods specific to the input channels on the instrument.
MATLAB® instrument drivers specify the type and quantity of device groups for device objects.
Group objects can be accessed via the get
command.
For the Tektronix® TDS 210 oscilloscope, there is a channel group
that contains two group objects. The device property to access a group
is always the group name.
chans = get(d, 'Channel') HwIndex: HwName: Type: Name: 1 CH1 scope-channel Channel1 2 CH2 scope-channel Channel2
To display the functions that a device group object supports,
use the methods
function.
methods(chans(1))
You can also display a list of the group object's properties and their current settings.
chans(2)
To get help on a driver-specific property or function, use the instrhelp
function, with the name
of the function or property.
instrhelp(chans(1),'Coupling')
This example shows how to obtain waveform data from a Tektronix TDS 210 oscilloscope with a square wave signal input on channel 1, on a Windows® machine. The methods used are specific to this instrument:
Create and connect — First, create the device object for the oscilloscope and then connect to the instrument.
s = serial('com1'); d = icdevice('tektronix_tds210', s); connect(d);
Get the device group — To retrieve waveform data, first gain access to the Waveform group for the device object.
w = d.waveform;
This group is specific for the hardware you are using. The TDS 210 oscilloscope has one Waveform; therefore the group contains one group object.
HwIndex: HwName: Type: Name: 1 Waveform1 scope-waveform Waveform1
Obtain the waveform —
Now that you have access to the Waveform group objects, you can call
the readwaveform
function to acquire the data.
For this example, channel 1 of the oscilloscope is reading the signal.
To access this channel, call readwaveform
on the
first channel.
wave = invoke(w, 'readwaveform', 'channel1');
View the data —
The wave
variable now contains the waveform data
from the oscilloscope. Use the plot
command to
view the data.
plot(wave);
Disconnect and clean up — Once the task is done, disconnect the hardware and free the memory used by the objects.
disconnect(d) delete([d s]) clear d, s, w, wave;