We are often asked about protocol triggers: starting a capture on an I虏C address, or on one particular byte going by on a UART line. It is a powerful feature, and also one that can feel a little complex to use, especially from the SDK.
So here is the whole picture: how to set one up from your own code in a few lines, what happens underneath, and what it looks like on a real bench.
There is an email we get about once a month. The wording changes, the question does not: "Can I run this from a script?"
For years the honest answer was "sort of." We had the IHWAPI, one C library per device family, and it could open a device and hand you raw transitions. The decoding, the triggers, the measurements, everything that makes ScanaStudio useful, you had to rebuild yourself. A few brave people did. Most people, quite reasonably, did not.
With V6 the answer is yes. In Python, NodeJS, Rust or C. With every feature the window has, not a reduced automation subset.
Every version of ScanaStudio until now was one program. It owned the USB cable, it owned the samples, and it owned the window. Close the window, and the capture went with it. Want to look at the analyser sitting on the bench in the next room? Walk.
That worked for a long time. It also quietly blocked most of the things people kept asking us for.
So we did the thing engineers are told never to do. We started over.
ScanaStudio V6 is a new server written in Rust, a new interface, and one download for Windows, Linux and macOS. This post is about what that changes for you, not about how we built it.
We were working on a CANopen-to-Modbus converter for a factory project when the firmware decided to develop a personality.
Every now and then, the converter would crash with a HardFault. Not every hour. Not every test cycle. Not even every shift. More like once every one or two days, just often enough to be a serious problem and just rarely enough to be deeply annoying.
And of course, the bug only showed up in the real installation.
In a factory, that is a terrible place to play "let's try stuff and see what happens." The environment is mission-critical, the system has to keep doing its job, and nobody is excited about an engineer showing up with a cable and a chaotic debugging plan.
So we needed a different approach: bring the factory home.
Debugging state machines can be challenging, especially when you're trying to understand complex state transitions in real-time hardware. We're pleased to announce significant enhancements to ScanaStudio's State Machine decoder, making it easier than ever to visualize and analyze state machine behavior captured with your logic analyzer.
