analogdevicesinc / alice

Active Learning Interface for Circuits and Electronics
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AWG outputs interrupted waveforms and depends on Time mS/Div setting #17

Open evanmladina opened 2 years ago

evanmladina commented 2 years ago

I have tried locating this in the docs but haven't been able to. When using the AWG in ALICE DeskTop 1.3 to generate a signal, it seems that the length of an uninterrupted waveform is determined by the Time mS/Div setting. To clarify, if for example I am trying to generate a sine wave, the ADALM1000 will output a sine wave for some amount of time (no more than maybe two seconds), then output a DC signal for a short amount of time (less than half a second), and then repeat, like it is outputting packets of sine waves. On top of that, the length of these packets depends on what I have set in Time mS/Div. If I increase the number, the length of the packet increases. I would think that I should be able to get a continuous, uninterrupted sine wave, regardless of what the mS/Div is set to.

Is it possible that there is some setting I am missing or my laptop just isn't powerful enough?

damercer commented 2 years ago

This is normal behavior. The ADALM1000 and the supporting library libsmu support two operating modes. We refer to these two modes as discontinuous and continuous. You control which mode ALICE will use by selecting or not selecting the Sync AWG check box in the AWG controls. When the box is checked discontinuous mode is used where the AWG waveform stops at the end of a sweep and restarts from the beginning of the waveform. The length of the waveform is obviously related to the length of the (time) sweep. With the box not checked continuous mode is used where the AWG waveform loops back on itself continuously. This is all explained in the ALICE user guide under the AWG section.

Doug