Hi @NickLL,
Thanks for the detailed information! I received a similar report from one of the Joulescope beta users a while back. I was able to duplicate the issue, and it looks like you have as well. I believe that I know why this is happening, but I have not yet had time to thoroughly investigate.
Your Joulescope is intended as a single quadrant (+V, +I) device, but it does support some -V and -I for transients. Joulescope’s fast autoranging feature only works on +I overflow. -I overflow range switching is handled differently and is much slower. Here are the designed ranges (not the guaranteed specified range) for each range selection:
*** VOLTAGE ***
Select Range Range
min max
0 -1.16 V 16.8 V
1 -513 mV 5.04 V
*** CURRENT ***
Select Range Range
min max
0 -1.80 A 10.4 A
1 -470 mA 2.17 A
2 -42.7 mA 197 mA
3 -4.23 mA 19.5 mA
4 -423 µA 1.95 mA
5 -42.3 µA 195 µA
6 -4.23 µA 19.5 µA
As an aside, one of the earlier Joulescope prototypes was fully bipolar with four quadrant operation. However, I decided to go to (mostly) single quadrant operation to save cost and double the effective performance.
That said, you should not be seeing an autoranging oscillation on the negative side. I have bumped up the priority for this investigation.