We recently purchased a 1480A analyzer and have found it extremely valuable. It has helped us identify protocol issues which would have kept us scratching our heads forever without the diagnostic information the tool provided!
Now we need to move to a next step. Our product has an intermittent failure mode which can take over 100 iterations before failure. I need to set up an automated test bench to exercise the product for days at a time so that we can verify a "fix" to the intermittent problem (or more pessimistically, cause it to fail even if it takes days to do so).
In order to get the most value from this exercise, I want to use the 1480A to perform captures on every iteration of the test. An iteration may take as little as 30 seconds, and the only interesting data that needs to be saved is when the failure occurs.
So what I am trying to work out is if there may be a way to automate the execution of the capture software so as to instruct it to start/stop captures under automation control.
Now I'm only a "user" of Windows (I know very little about programming or scripting of things-Windows), so there may be obvious approaches of which I am not aware. Being as neophyte as I am, I'm starting by looking at Powershell and trying to learn if perhaps there is some way it could be used to "operate" the capture program.
Two things come to mind: Powershell has COM capabilities as well as being intrinsically .NET based. Would anyone know if there is a chance that either of these capabilities might be leveraged to "control" the 1480A capture program in an automated fashion. And any other suggestions would be welcome as well.
Many thanks for any suggestions
Bill