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Making Screenshots of Test Equipment Old and New

- Introduction - Screenshot Capturing Interfaces - Hardware and Software Tools - Capturing GPIB data in Talk Only mode - TDS 540 Oscilloscope - GPIB - PCL Output - HP 54542A Oscilloscope - Parallel Port - PCL or HPGL Output - HP Inifinium 54825A Oscilloscope - Parallel Port - Encapsulated Postscript - TDS 684B - Parallel Port - PCX Color Output - Advantest R3273 Spectrum Analyzer - Parallel Port - PCL Output - HP 8753C Vector Network Analyzer - GPIB - HP 8753 Companion - Siglent SDS 2304X Oscilloscope - USB Drive, Ethernet or USB Introduction Last year, I create Fake Parallel Printer, a tool to capture the output of the parallel printer port of old-ish test equipment so that it can be converted into screenshots for blog posts etc. It’s definitely a niche tool, but of all the projects that I’ve done, it’s definitely the one that has seen the most amount of use.

This oscilloscope was an ridiculous $20 bargain at the Silicon Valley Electronics Flea Market and it’s the one I love working with the most: the user interface is just so smooth and intuitive. PCX is a very old bitmap file format, I used it way back in 1988 on my first Intel 8088 PC, but it compresses with run length encoding which works great on oscilloscope screenshots. Unlike my HP 1670G logic analyzer, the Siglent supports DHCP but when writing this blog post, the scope refused to grab an IP address on my network.

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