I’ve been using the instrument occasionally since receiving it from the KS campaign, and in the last week or so rather intensively. Early on I was completely baffled by its ranging controls and UI, being an old-school scope-with-knobs kind of girl, but am now beginning to feel comfortable with and even like it One thing I’d suggest is moving some things, in particular the peak indicator selection (none, lines, fill) from where it’s currently buried 4 or 5 clicks deep in “Preferences”, to buttons on the toolbar. I mean there are acres of space available, and this is something I like to switch fairly often. Visibility controls for the displayed measurements would also be better as buttons also, rather than being in “Settings” where people can go a long time without even knowing they’re there (don’t ask me how I know).
Another thing I’d love to see is measurements in mAH. I’d wager that most people using this instrument are concerned with battery life, but I’ve yet to see a battery data sheet specifying coulombs or joules. Yes, it’s a simple calculation, but hey, this thing is hooked up to a computer, so I shouldn’t have to do calculations just to get the basic quantity it’s supposed to measure, in a usable unit. If you really want to make me happy, let me enter a number in mAH for battery capacity, and display the projected run time in days/hours. Yes, I know there are a lot of other factors affecting run time like cutoff voltage, battery resistance, varying current draw with declining voltage etc, but trust your users to be able to enter a pre-fudged battery capacity number for a ballpark run time estimates.
Lastly, long-time measurements. This is crucial for a lot of users and applications, and we shouldn’t have to deal with scripts and other hacker-ish stuff - it should be built in, imo.
Thanks for creating Joulescope, I’m finally digging it!
Hi @JuliaTruchsess - Great to hear that you are liking your Joulescope, and thank you for taking the time to provide your feedback!
We have received a bunch of feedback on improving Preferences in the Joulescope UI, and this is our next scheduled major feature improvement. james-dm submitted Issue #28 yesterday with the exact same request for the min/max lines. Instead of a button, it will likely be a right-click context menu item on the waveform view. Does that work for you?
We also want to have more intuitive persistence of preferences and the ability to automatically restart the Joulescope UI in the same state as where you left it last. We also will be adding font customization and statistics customization.
The Joulescope UI does display charge in Ah at the bottom right of the multimeter view, but we do not have an option in the oscilloscope view. We will be able to add this when we add customization of statistics. Having a battery calculation tool is definitely on the list, but is further down in our current priority. We’ll get there!
I hear you on the long-term measurements. The reliability and recovery requirements for long-term data collection is at odds with easy-to-use, auto-everything normal UI operation, which is why it’s separate now. We currently envision a new Tools → Long-Term Data Collection that would force the Joulescope software to start in a different mode, which allows for recovery on power outages, host computer reboots, etc. The new tool would have some way to stop the long-term data collection and return to normal operation. What do you think?
Personally I much prefer buttons. Hiding it behind a right-click makes it one more thing that’s not intuitively obvious, and it’s also then two operations - right click, then select - instead of one click. A small thing, but then UI elegance and joy is all about small things
Re Ah and stats customization, great, looking forward to it! Would like to see more understandable identifiers like “avg” instead of Greek letters, also.
Re long-term measurement, I’m sure you’ve thought it through and will do the right thing. I just know that I could use it
I’m absolutely for the mA/H indication and “normal” descriptions of average, min, max etc The only way I can find my way thru these is looking at the numbers (the lowest value must be “low” type of things)
Also it would be VERY great for a way of setting the samplerate when doing “recording of data to disk”, I did a 17 hour log of data, this created 408GB of data, hardly manageable! Something in the line of the wonderful Salaea interface, you set the samplerate and thats it.
But all in all Joulescope is a very nice tool, we just need the little things finished
Hi @cgroen and welcome to the forum! Thanks for your input on the labels and units. We are currently working on a major improvement to how we manage application preferences within the Joulescope UI so that we can implement features like this.
The next planned major feature after our current preferences work is downsampling support. You are not alone in wanting this feature, and we’ll get there!
One thing I’d suggest is moving some things, in particular the peak indicator selection (none, lines, fill) from where it’s currently buried 4 or 5 clicks deep in “Preferences”, to buttons on the toolbar. I mean there are acres of space available, and this is something I like to switch fairly often. Visibility controls for the displayed measurements would also be better as buttons also, rather than being in “Settings” where people can go a long time without even knowing they’re there (don’t ask me how I know).
The only way I can find my way thru these is looking at the numbers (the lowest value must be “low” type of things)