I have purchased the Joulescope for a battery monitoring application and so far it works great (except for the crashes when removing markers).
One thing that I find missing (and that would be fairly easy to implement) is a decent charge display. The accumulated coulomb value is only visible in the multimeter view as a tiny figure besides the (for me uselessly) large Joule reading.
Suggestion:
Add coulomb (and maybe Ah) readout to the single value display
Add option to replace the J reading (4th line in multimeter display) with Ah or C.
It’s already going to be in the next release, which also fixes the crash on removing markers. We were hoping to get the release out this week, but that’s no longer happening. With Thanksgiving week next week here in the US, it will likely be the first week of December.
The next release will only display in C for now, but we will add the Ah conversion in a future release.
Hi Matt, looks good!
Now if the multimeter would also show the large C figure… UI suggestion: Right click on the mC or uAh (in your screenshot) and “set as main readout” or so.
Although this would add to the obscure difficult to find context menus (I would not have found the markers had I not read through the manual).
Maybe as a final thought: I have the Joulescope diplay mostly maximized on my second monitor. Layout gets a bit suboptimal when adding the single value display on top. Only a small strip is left for the (most important) scope strip. Maybe you could add a two column multimeter display option in order to save vertical screen space when used in a widescreen layout.
I do like right-click context menus for advanced features since they do not confuse new or less technical users. The problem as you mentioned is feature discoverability.
You can break out any of the dock widgets into their own window. For example, left-click and drag on the Multimeter dock widget bar, shown here:
Nice… didn’t know this was possible. With some mouse trickery, I managed to squeeze the multimeter on the second screen and keep the large scope readout:
Disagree that context menus “do not confuse” and agree that discoverability is the issue. They are terribly confusing because important functions seem to be missing. Even if you read the manual, you’re likely to forget over time if you haven’t used it for a while. Full-time visible buttons and controls are not confusing imo, they’re immediately obvious and intuitive if labeled sensibly - anyone spending the money on this device is in all likelihood accustomed to instruments (hardware or software) that have buttons and controls. Contextual selections also generally require more mouse operations than buttons and switches.
Full ack. Particularly the markers are an essential feature that should be accessible without manual. To be fair, the implementations of Picoscope and Saleae are not much better either.
Thanks, Matt. It’s good to know that the option of displaying charge in Ah will be available soon. That feature will be very useful to us, because it will be easier to determine how much capacity will be taken from a battery during specific events. I tend to think in Ah, not C.
Hi Alan, and welcome to the forum! We have the 0.8.0 release that should be coming out this week. The primary focus of 0.8.0 is downsampling which helps will long duration captures where you do not need the full 2 millions samples per second. The Ah conversion will not be in 0.8.0, but it will be in the next one planned for end of March 2020.
