The software accompanying USB scopes has up till now, almost universally, been designed to work with Windows machines.  Pico Technology who produce the PicoScope range of USB scopes have announced the PicoScope 6 oscilloscope software will now allow their scopes to run of Linux machines. The company acknowledged that the software has been developed in response to requests from customers working in scientific and educational fields where Linux has a strong foothold.

 

Together with the USB scope hardware, the PicoScope 6 software turns a Linux machine into an oscilloscope, FFT spectrum analyzer and signal measurement tool. In its current version it implements only the most important features from the Windows version but Pico Technology have indicated that more functions will be made available in the near future. Users can save waveform captures for off-line analysis, share them with other PicoScope for Windows and PicoScope for Linux users or export them in text, CSV and Mathworks MATLAB 4 formats.

 

PicoScope 6 is available for Debian 7.0 ("wheezy"), Ubuntu 12.xx / 13.xx as well as other Debian-based distributions with mono-runtime version 2.10.81. or higher. Drivers are available for the current range of scopes ranging from the PicoScope 2000 to 6000 series. The company also plans to add driver support for older products. The software is available free from the company Web site which also hosts a support forum.