TSP #155 - Keithley DAQ6510 6.5-Digit Data Acquisition & Multimeter Review, Teardown & Experiments

[Music] hi welcome to the signal path in this episode I have another product review for you guys we'll be taking a look at the Keithley da Q 6510 which is a hybrid data acquisition and six-and-a-half digit multimeter in one box Keithley has been releasing a lot of new instruments lately they all follow the same design philosophy with a unified operating system and I've done quite a few reviews on those I've done reviews on their source meters as well as their seven-and-a-half digit multimeters now they have of course the da Q 6510 and the DMM 6510 the really nice thing about this unified eco system is that they all use the same design language and they all have the same OS and therefore the same capabilities not to mention that they are compatible with the same scripting which is called TSP as well as the same software on the PC allowing it to basically create almost a turnkey solution for measurement automation and measurement analysis and of course a lot of those capabilities already built into these units as well it's really nice to see that Keithley is creating this brand new ecosystem of instruments and once they get started it's really hard to catch up with them because first of all they are one of the best if not the best test and measurement in this domain being able to create analog measurement equipment of course and now they have this nice continuously growing set of instruments that all follow the same design philosophy so I'm really happy to see that this is I've had this for quite some time it's just been really busy to make a review out of it but we're going to take a look at it we're going to take it apart I want to tell you some of its capabilities and the different acquisition cards that can go into it and we're going to design some experiments as we always do here at the signal path to see what happens to the instrument when you want to use it in some real-life scenarios so there's a lot to do I can only really cover a portion of his capabilities but definitely watch the other videos because there's a lot of details in there as well and you can see some of the other capabilities of the unit which I'm not going to cover in this video but anyway let's get started so here's a data sheet for the da Q 6510 and of course as I said this would also make you very good six and a half digit digital multimeter and you know here we have some of the specifications and measurement capability is down to 10 Pico ampere DC current and to 100 nano volt in DC voltage and here you have the range for the instrument when it's in digitized mode at one mega sample per second you still have an enormous dynamic range of measurement capability built into it which is quite nice you also have down to one on full scale when you're operating in for wire resistance mode so it is a very capable multimeter as you would expect I'm not going to go through the entire datasheet but I definitely encourage you to go and take a look and there and also see all the different modules that you could have in conjunction with the unit so we have here there's 7700 we could push we're going to take a look at but depending on what kind of data acquisition you do and what kind of measurements you want to do you can of course choose a different one then that can be pretty handy because you never know what kind of applications you have you can mix and match these there's two slots there you can try but I'm not going to bore you with the details of the datasheet you can obviously go ahead and take a look at it and see if it suits your application but more importantly let's take a look at unit itself and take it apart and here's the front panel of the Keithley DEQ 6510 data acquisition and multimeter system now as I mentioned earlier you don't want a data acquisition unit that compromises the operation of the multimeter aspect of the instrument and this one indeed does not do that as you can see from the front panel it is indistinguishable from a multimeter and all the functionality and ease of use of this unit is identical to a very good six and a half digit meter in fact the only difference is that there is a terminal switch in the front which is either front or rear selection you can see it's a push-button here and that is the only difference really and when you go to the rear the offering system detects that and influences the way the OS operates which is great and I will show you that in just a second for power button they're using soft power unlike the other source meter and multimeters in the same series which all have hard power buttons they must have changed the power supply design for whatever reason they prefer to have the soft power USB a few buttons on the left here and a few buttons on the right I think these are the good choices to have home menu apps and help copies contextual apps is a new kind of ant and kinda ecosystem they've introduced in the operating system of these new instruments we'll take a look at that it's quite interesting and the enter exit function and trigger which are the buttons that you would want to use quite frequently the LCD screen is a multi-touch capacitive very bright very high resolution just like the other source medium multimeters system they have accepted is now recessed and I like it I think I like it a little more it's more defined the edges are a little bit easier to kind of see from far away so I looks good and the front of course has D typical high and this ends the four port and the current in this one supports three amps it would be nice if it went to ten amps but three amps is fine for most cases I don't know that looks good legs lifts up looks the exactly like the other units from kind of design philosophy which is great it goes with the rest of the modernized look of Keatley let's take a look at the back and here's the back of the unit as you can see simple power input to module slots one of them I have removed so you can see how deep it goes these are fairly large we'll take a look inside one of these as well and this card here is interchangeable with several different functions this is option on unfortunately not included that's what the TSP link is an additional card you have to purchase as well as a digital i/o but Ethernet USB trigger in and out those are all basic functions that are supported on any of these units it's nice to see that there is two slots is typical to have two of them and this gives you flexibility to mix and match and put two different types in here and of course all fully accessible through the operating system looks good let's go and take a look inside one of these guys and then we'll take a look inside the unit itself as well and then we'll turn on do some experiments and here is what is inside the Keithley da Q 6510 this is a top PCB and it is beautiful just look at all of this wonderful analog and makes signal engineering that's gone onto this board let's talk about some of the interesting things that pop out when we look at this let's start from this corner this is a pluggable card this is the TSP LAN card has its own lattice cpld on it and some are your controls this is an optional card that you can plug in and once you plug it in there is an interface connector here so it's very straightforward there are several different types of these cards which you can have doing different things all sharing the same kind of interface but if you also look carefully you can see that there's a very clear cut out in the copper port on the board itself and this gap over here provides isolation from everything that's digital and more importantly everything that has a human interface from the main analog board not only do you want to isolate the main analog board from all the digital activity that happens on these components but you also want to separate them from all the high voltage that may be applied to the unit you don't want any of that to creep and potentially couple to anything outside of the unit itself over here we have some more others a bridge rectifier tied to the chassis here for thermal and there are some triggers and USB as well as Ethernet ports over here that makes sense all those signals are then routed over here which then connect to this little portion of the board and this portion of the board is interfaced to the front panel LCD now this front panel see these are more than just LCDs this is a full application processor operating system running into it is a it's essentially a computer that interfaces with everything else and everything runs on this and you when you update the firmware you also update this OS built into this as far as I can tell I can see any other application processor it may be on the other side of the board but nonetheless I believe everything is running on this and the screen here and you can see cutouts on the board to further improve isolation and you can see that we have a few components across the card board use or high-speed up to optically coupled IO interfaces to send signals back and forth so you can essentially control this entire region directly from these tiny little interface and there's some more over here as well when these cutouts are really obviously well engineered and engineered with purpose they're not just randomly placed depending on where the signals are what kind of signals across them they have been designed to handle those furthermore you can see a connector here which brings power most likely into this entire region the power supplies on the other side of the board but if you look carefully this thing actually has a fan and the fan is right over here but it's underneath this board and it's very cleverly placed because you don't want any air flow on top of this board you don't want the temperature over this board to be unknown because you don't know what the ambient temperature is and you don't want the fan to blow air over this in order to keep everything here at a constant predictable and uniform temperature they have made sure that the PCB hugs the chassis in such a way not to have any air exchange from the fan so the fan underneath this area only cools the power supply which you don't see of course you're because on the other side and you can only see two connections where power is brought in to the board so a very clever up a very clever thermal design of any instrument like this is also necessary another thing to note is that this has the same footprint as a regular multimeter but most of this chassis has to be empty because the pluggable modules here's an example of that you can see how big these pluggable modules are and how thick they are and there's two of them therefore you have most of these chassis empty so the power supply is confined only to this region the rest of it is the plastic enclosure which accepts the data acquisition modules if you look at some of the analog functions we can see here is the lattice as cpld that also is responsible for the interface it may also be responsible for the multi-store data conversion and so on I'm not sure there may be a dedicated a to D converter we can dig into that and find it but we can get a rough idea of the architecture here is our linear reference there that's a very common thing these things have a built-in oven selected and tuned and aged and so on this is a very common knowledge with multimeter design we have our input protection that the input circuitry here is really important because unlike a regular multimeter you don't just have the front panel but you also have to reliably and Reap with high degrees of repeatability switch the input terminals to the acquisition board on the other side it's not something so straightforward here is the connections you can see here these connectors are the iOS that go into the data acquisition boards on the other side and they're very close to each other and they have met the necessary cutter house to protect them from each other as well as from leakage to from port to port and to be able to switch them back and forth to the front panel inputs which are these and the ports that go to the other side this the long device here you can see this switch that I can switch back and forth is what does all that switching so the input has to be switched using these little network here so there's a lot of work that's gone into making sure that that's repeatable and reliable gas discharge tube different kinds of protection there's a big fuse over there another gas discharge high speed high voltage series resistors and a fluke laser trim precision resistor array that you may not see from that side but there is a there's it's glued to on one of the components so it doesn't vibrate and shift you never want to touch these or move them because then you throw away the calibration of course off this unit even though this is only six and a half and I say only six and a half you don't want to have drift at 610 I did you didn't want you don't want it to have drift of course and everything else is very nice lots of you know analog devices and components over here and op amps and so all the functionality of a typical multimeter but the general architecture is really nicely well put together the board is fantastic layouts everything is beautiful again this acutely what else you expect this has to be this good and some components underneath this over here I'm not sure what exactly it's happening but there's not that many things on the other side maybe just for isolation or for high voltage protection and so on or it might be even a heatsink from the other side so I don't know that looks good let's go ahead and put it back together I'm eager to turn it on play around with the GUI show you a few experiments and then see what we can do with the data acquisition let's go ahead and take a look at one of these pluggable modules this is the Keithley 7700 one of the many different pluggable modules compatible with this data acquisition instrument and I'm going to take the front off of course you're supposed to be able to do this when you want to connect something to a single screw pretty straightforward so the job of any pluggable module in the data acquisition system is to time multiplex many inputs to the same common v terminals in the front of the instrument that you see and typically using a multimeter fashion now this sounds very simple but there's a lot of things to consider how do you liable a are you routing the signals are configurable the data acquisition module is how about is its life span how much bandwidth it has how much isolation it has so we're going to talk about a few of those and the first and most important thing is whether it's a solid-state switching or electromechanical switching now this is of course electromechanical it has a lot of advantages advantages its reliability its linearity and so on and on of course it has limited life as a consequence so the choice of relays is pretty important and they're using NEC these are Japan Japanese made electromechanical relays there's a pretty much some of the best you can get in the world and they have very long life and these are a latching electromechanical relays and logic is important because once you switch between the two states he relays don't consume any power aside from having magnetic fields around you also don't want them to get warm because warm the entire module getting is really warm because all these mechanical relays are turned on it's going to throw off some of the cold reference Junction compensation that is done for thermocouple measurements so these are all the right choices for this now this particular 7,700 module has 20 independent channels that you can use for two-wire measurements or you can configure those 20 channels and use 10 of them and do four wire measurements and that makes sense because if you're going to do four wire measurements you're going to need twice as many relays for the same connectivity there's also two independent channels channel 1 and 20 21 and 22 that allows you to do current measurement and are protected by local fuses and this gives you 3 amp fuse protection there so you can get to current measurements at the same time now this is particularly engineered for thermocouple measurements because this is one of the very important applications for the acquisition to monitor and measure temperature across let's say an entire mainframe that you would want to monitor because of thermal behavior fans and and so on and on is very common to do that now as I said the lifespan of these relays is critical now these ones are rated for 100,000 actuations at full load or a hundred million actuations if there is no load and that kind of makes sense as well because when you have load through the contact with the contact point that's failing not the electromechanical behavior itself and they're rated at a less than an ohm degradation of contact at the end of life which is pretty good and then there you can measure and all the specification of how much offset current and so on it is introduced introduced into a measurement these are all in the datasheet so I'm not going to go over them but they are rated to 300 volts if you're using them for voltage measurement now the other thing is of course you're going to be using these relays at different rates sometimes you're missing a few of the channels and that causes some of the relays to age faster than the other ones there is an EEPROM here right over here and you see prom is going to measure how many actuations these relays have had and that you can access from the instrument so you know which ones are close to the end of life and then you can also balance out how use them so that you get the most life out of this unit that's pretty important the rest of the circuitry you see here are what is needed to switch the relays and some up to couplers to do isolation another important thing is that you have to do at the cold Junction reference compensation for the thermocouple measurements and there is one two three four five six temperature measurement units directly built into the board and if you look carefully you can see that they all share a heavily metallized plate of copper that's on the PCB to even out the temperature across these regions to give you as much of a uniform temperature measurement as you can ideally you would want to have of course many more but then I'll just increase the cost and complexity of reading all these things and putting more devices so with three on each side you get kind of a good idea of the temperature across all of these terminals which are the terminals you're going to be using to connect thermocouples to other than that I think it's pretty straightforward everything else looks good and this thing has about 50 megahertz of bandwidth so you can do frequency measurements with it there's a complete a diagram of the interconnectivity of all these relays is also available but that's also available inside the unit so you can configure it directly from the instrument itself as we will do when we do some experiments with it other than that I think that covers it pretty much and looks very nice and engineered exactly this is one of the things that clearly does best in the world they they've been doing this for so many years they know exactly what they're doing and these are screw terminals have very large screws this is really helpful you don't want a tiny screw because when you want to connect this in the lab you want to look for a screwdriver that's basically useless for everything else except for these terminals so it's nice that they pay attention even to these tiny little details so let's go and take a look at the unit tube and then we'll do some experiments so let's go ahead and turn it on and see how long it takes for it to be ready for measurement now obviously it's going to have to boot up and bring the entire operating system up before you can use it and it's surprisingly fast remember everything is running directly on this little LCD module which is the front panel and it does a bit of self-test and everything during power on which is necessary for an instrument of this complexity but there this you can see it's up and running now right now it is a select to rear which means that it is operating in a data acquisition format but if you want to just use it as a multimeter and you switch to the front the OS just detects that and brings you into a front panel of a regular multimeter so now you have essentially what is indistinguishable from a six and a half digit meter with all the bells and whistles that come with a new Keithley line of multimeters now I've done extensive reviews and looked at exactly how these GUI works it's very nice and it's been improved quite a bit since the very first version came out the operation is quite a bit more smooth and then the buttons and the selections and the way the OS just works internally has been fine-tuned and refined based on all the feedback from users and bugs that have been reported so it works really well as you can see over here here's our statistic analysis here here is our secondary display which you can you know set for example to be temperature this case is not selected to be anything and then all the different functions of the multimeter itself then you have the settings of whatever measurement you're in right now for instance we are doing 1 L and L PC you can just easily change that to 5 which then of course the measurement rate is going to go down because it's now sinc doing multiple measurements within each line frequency so let's see here's our graph which you can then maximize and then do a whole bunch of different kind of looks and zoom in and figure out what's going on this is very useful in the digitized mode we will take a look at that and I've done extensive reviews of this OS with the source meter and other multimeters that I have reviewed so really have no complaints about this I think it's it's become a long ways since it was first introduced and it's just gotten better and better as time has passed so let's go ahead and see how easy it is to set up a measurement station so normally in the industry you would want to characterize thousands or even tens of thousands of components to find out what kind of statistical distribution they have so here I have a whole bunch of diodes and we want to find out what kind of a histogram and minimum maximum and variation we observe in the forward bias voltage of these dials so you want to do this you can obviously make one measurement at a time and then put it into a spreadsheet and do all your computation there but I want to do all of that directly in the unit so there's a couple of challenges the first is well first of all we have to make sure we're measuring the forward diet bias voltage diode correctly we'll take a look at that and then we want to find a way to create a trigger mechanism and add so that you can go one at a time and measure them one at the time and have some some kind of actuation or an external trigger that allows the instrument to move to the next measurement so here I have just connected a little momentary switch directly to the trigger output or input of this instrument there there is a port in the back which I showed you earlier so we're going to develop and write our own little flow chart here directly in the instrument without using any PC to find out how easy it is to do that so let's go ahead and measure the diode so we have to set up the diode measurement so that's easy to do of course you can just go and the diode setting right now we were reading overflow because there is no diode connected across the terminal let's go ahead in the settings menu and change the NL PC to 3 so we get a little bit more filtered results here and we have to also choose what kind of bias level we want to apply now luckily for us this instrument gives us quite a few options now why is this important but let's say I measure my dad at 10 million forward bias I get the voltage across the diode at a 10 million current but that's going to heat up the diode because 10 milli amp is still a fairly large amount of current so you're going to get it thermal effect across the measurement that makes to a measurement much more sensitive to the delay between measurement to measurement cycles in a production run it may not be such a big deal because all the timings are exactly the same but you want to remove that as much as possible so in this case we're going to use the smallest current here 10 micro amp so that we don't get too much thermal effect in our measurement let's go ahead and connect it to the first diode there you go I'm just going to connect it forward after the two terminals from the front and there it is there you go it's reasonable point six oh three volts forward bias voltage at 10 micro amp forward bias current that is all very reasonable we can go from diode to diode and continue to make measurements now the trick is how do we set up a proper triggering mechanism and a trigger flow in order to make continuous measurement across all of our samples so the triggering capabilities of these instruments are truly impressive this is where they shine and allowing you to create some really customized settings here so if you go under menu and then you go under the trigger here there are trigger templates built in there and trigger templates are quite a few options over here and you can see that even sword pinning and great pinning is already included these things can get really complicated as we will see you can pass variables and we can have customization in your trigger directly built into it now I'm not going to start with one of these because I want to show you how it is to build your own but not only can you use one of the pre-made ones but you can also modify it once you load it into the memory so instead we're going to do our own for now you won't be gonna configure here right now we have a completely blank trigger menu so right now you can see the instrument is in idle meaning that well it's idle and you're just going to continue staying in idle and if I start this it will essentially do nothing so let's go ahead and insert a new triggering block and we have a whole bunch of different options here so we're going to take an action and the very first action we want to take is to clear all the buffer because we want to have a clean memory and we're going to store only the measurements we were interested in so we're going to clear the buffer that's pretty straightforward the next thing is that we want the instrument to wait until it receives the signal from the trigger so that it knows when to do the measurement that is from the actual switch that I showed you earlier so we're going to go insert another block and we to do a weight and this weight is going to be until one of these triggered events happen and as you can see quite a few options there you can even have an analogue trigger when you're in digitization or a voltage or current measurement so that you can find out when there is a sudden change in the analog voltage being measured that you can do a trigger this is really useful if you just want to create a lot of measurements doing a lot of analog voltage measurements across the board for instance but for us we're going to use our triggering so external triggering we can configure that whether we wanted to be on the rising or the falling since we're going to ground it it's going to be on the falling we're going to keep that as it is so our external trigger data is coming from a mechanical switch not coming from a digital circuit which means that every time I actuate this switch I may have a bouncing effect and I may get multiple trigger coming in because it's just a regular switch so we have to take care of that to make sure that doesn't create multiple unwanted measurements in a row so that's easy to do so let's go ahead after the first wait for trigger we're going to insert another block now we're going to do oops that's not what I wanted to do we're going to insert a block of notify this notified means that once it reaches that it's going to create a notification within the unit to do something else so right now we want to create a timer notification it means that once you get to that is going to notify the timer to begin counting this allows us to create a delay and the delay is the easiest way to get rid of a bounced condition on a mechanical switch there it is we're going to say time and let's use time I wanna consider is quite a few timers here there this so what's going to happen is that once if you hit notified the notify is going to start this timer now I'm gonna have to wait until that timer is finished so we're going to insert again another way and this time we're going to wait for the timer and we're going to use timer 1 as our main event and we can configure time we want to be at a certain count or delay delay is a convenient one delay of one second there it is so right now what's going to happen is it's going to clear the buffer wait for a trigger notify the timer wait for the timer of one second and then it has to do something else so at this point we were ready to actually take a measurement ok so let's go ahead insert and we're going to do an action and this action is going to be measured there this so now it's going to measure and we're going to say how many times you want to measure what we just want to measure one so we get one measurement this means that our buffer is going to be filled with one measurement per row so we are doing exactly one measurement per component okay now that we have the measurement per component we have to make sure that we measure enough times to cover all of our components here I have thirty diodes so we can just count 30 times so let's go ahead and insert another block and this time we're going to do a branch because branches are really handy because you can find out how many different paths you can take and depending on what's happening you can go to a different point in your trigger it can get really cool and really complicated so in this case we're going to do a loop counter which is the simplest one and we can configure the loop counter to count for 30 times because there are 30 components there this and then it says what do I do if if the count has if the count is less than the number it goes through know and if it's largely goes through yes well as long as it's less you wanted to continue doing measurement and right now you can see it's branching to block number one which is not good because that's going to clear all of our measurements so instead of branching to one we're going to branch to two there this there is our signal flow of our trigger all built into the unit itself and how we are finally ready to make measurements then the nice thing is that even though I'm going to be doing continuous measurements I can be in any menu of the instrument during the measurement I don't have to be in the actual measurement anyway I'm going to show you well let's get started by setting everything up I'm going to have my first measurement down of the first out so let me hook that up there this and then we're going to go we can go into the home menu over here and right now you're not doing any measurement you can see we're an idle because it's not running right now but I can go ahead and initialize the trigger menu there you go we can go over here and say initial triggers menu now it's waiting because it's waiting for my trigger event which in this case is the actuator switch I can go ahead and actuate that and there is there's our first measurement so now my first toilet has been measured you can see is one measurement is being done now I can move to the second dial and once it's once I move these clips I can trigger again here's the second measurement and I can continue on and if I go under menu here and the reading you can see each individual measurement being recorded and little graph being given here so let me go to the third diode here and then we're going to actuate another measure here's another one there this you can see it's recorded so I'm gonna continue this and get all the measurements and then we can look at a histogram you can also look at the histogram even live as it is being built of course at there is we can see we can even look at it curve as it's live as it's being built this is all possible as measurements are being done which is really handy so you can manipulate the screen while all the trigger events are waiting or they are running which is quite nice okay I'm gonna go ahead and do all the 30 measurements and we can take a look at the histogram and we're done there this you can see all of our measurements all the way up to 30 30 diodes and we can see our plot over here let's go and take a look at the data and analyze it a little bit so we saw the graph already you can see all the different measurements being done here that's nice but really what I was interested in was the histogram when there is a histogram and you can see most of the measurements almost all of them or have a nice and if I were to build more and more measurements you see a very good cost in distribution but I just discovered one outlier this one over here has 620 millivolt as a bias voltage which is quite a bit more than everything else you can see these guys are all bunched up together here's a few with the low end half otherwise 598 but then there is one guy all the way out there so then this would allow you to reject that part or to bin it in a separate bin and put it somewhere else you can also go in here of course and look at these statistical data over here we can see the peak to peak value you can see the average you can see the standard deviation and a minimum and maximum we can see that outlier 620 millivolt is there and you can see 30 readings over here now you can extract that information put it onto you know some other computation software outside of the unit if you want to but really there is nothing there's no limitation on what you can do once we have the data but you can see how easy it is to set up a complex trigger condition and put it all together and then get the data from the unit one other time I think is really nice so let's take a look at it digitizing capability of this instrument at one mega sample per second and 16 bit of resolution you can extract a lot of dynamic behavior from the circuit you're testing without having to invoke an oscilloscope not to mention the extra dynamic range you're gonna get from this so here I have a DC DC converter it's set to 12 oz right now and it's turned off and normally you would be driving let's say resistive load with this currently we're driving a very complex impedance but it has a lot of inductive components to it and of course when I go ahead and enable the output you can see that it goes to about 12 volt which is where it's supposed to be so it's working fine but it doesn't tell us anything about how it goes from zero to 12 volts and what kind of waveform is it has on what kind of switching speed it has and what kind of ripple it may have so let's go ahead and configure this instrument to see if we can capture this at a time where we turn it on but therefore we need to have some triggering as well and then we can look at a waveform during the transition so let's go ahead and set this up here right now I'm in measuring voltage I can go to the digitization function and I'm going to change the range from 10 to 100 volts so right now it's continuously digitizing if I go ahead and turn the power supply on you can see we will read 12 volts and then turn that off it goes back to zero but this doesn't tell us anything while switching we have to set up a trigger for that as I showed you there's a couple of ways to do this but you can also set up a trigger directly on the graph menu here I can define a trigger here this is my graph it is being continuously measured right now if I go into trigger I can define a new trigger it's going to be a waveform in this case either an analog edge or a window and window you can look at some events happening within a certain window of time or voltage but in this case we want just the edge so let's define the edge to be 11 volts that is right before the power supply reaches this final voltage we're going to leave the position at 50% so we can see events before and I have to the trigger so now it's all kind of ready we can go ahead and initiate our trigger condition there you go so now it's going to continuously capture data waiting for a trigger event so that it would stop so we're going to go and turn the power supply on and here is the power supply is turned on so we should have seen our an event there it is check it out very nice now we see what the waveform was before it the power supply turned on how it got to the voltage you needed to and then how it stabilized after so you can see that the dynamic behavior has a little glitch in it because of the inductive law that I'm using to drive it but we can zoom in another will care more I look at this event a little bit more carefully and as soon as I do that some other interesting features emerge we can see that there is a little bit of a dip so there's some startup conditions in this power supply that are worth investigating and if you look more carefully you can even see the ripple as the power supply switching noise begins to kick in and if I can follow that you can see once it stabilizes that there is still some switching noise you can grab this data out of the instrument perform FFTs on it and then look at it on the computer it's too bad that it's not built into this and I think a FFT function in this instrument will be very useful because you can get immediately spectral content of this ultra high dynamic range signal you're capturing from the power supply itself so this would be quite quite useful to do it can also go back of course and I can look at the waveform before it turns on just to show you that indeed when the power supply is off you can see how much more quiet it is it doesn't have any ripple has to be expected so those ripples you see later are indeed from the power supply noise itself now all these functionality that I showed you are also applicable to the data acquisition as well you can do all of these functionalities under the data acquisition channels even though I've been using the front panel itself now that we know some details and operation of the unit let's go ahead and set up a date hi causation problem and see how the instrument handles that and here is our setup for the data acquisition so normally a data acquisition system like this they can have up to 80 channels can be configured to monitor and measure a lot of different kinds of parameters across a wide range of measurement a domain so for instance let's say you have a rack of instruments or boards in a communication environment and you want to see how the temperature profile changes with the fans coming on and off with different devices turning on and off and you want to monitor that across time so here we are emulating that we have two loads you can see two resistors here we're going to pass some current through them as a result are going to get hot and we're going to measure the temperature of both of them I have a a thermocouple here the thermocouple here they're both going into the unit itself we have a fan over here which is blowing only on one of these loads creating a thermal imbalance we want to study the behavior of that this fan is going to turn on sometimes during the operation we're going to monitor the voltage across the fan so we can find out when the fan turns on we can also look at the current through the load so we can correlate that with the temperature of the system obviously the temperature profile of the system is going to be complex and it's hard to know ahead of time so we can do an experiment to find out all the relevant information is being captured by this unit we're going to configure it in order to be able to get the most relevant perspective of what's going on I'm only using a fraction of all the channels but I'm using it to measure temperature current and as you can imagine this can be expanded to like I said 80 channels and do much much more sophisticated kind of measurement let's configure the instrument for our measurement right now of course during the front panel still let's go to the rear and nothing is configured so you're not seeing anything yet but we can go under the menu and we can go under the settings of the channel and define the channels that we are using and configure them for the appropriate measurements you can see that it has automatically detected acutely 7700 and that shows you all the connectivity inside that module which is quite nice we can see every single one where they go what they connect to so it makes it really convenient you don't have to go back and forth between the datasheet of the unit so channel 101 and channel 1 or 2 I'm using them as temperature measurements so we can define them as temperature I'm using a thermocouple type J so I can select that and I'm going to leave all the internal temperature compensation alone we're not gonna have to touch those but I do want to change the NL PC or an M PLC to 3 there we go and I want to change the display digits from three and a half to four enough okay that looks good now Channel 103 is the channel that I'm using to measure the voltage across the fan it's going to tell us when the fan is on and how hard it's being turned on so let's go ahead and change that to DC voltage and everything else and that looks good just going to change this as well to three there you go that defines our DC voltage for channel 103 and I'm going to go all the way to the bottom and I'm going to change Channel 122 which is the current measurement that's the current through the loads I'm going to define that measurement to be DC current as you can see everything else is disabled because it knows that that channel can only be used for DC current so we select that and we're going to do a similar thing and VLC can be changed to 3 there it is so now all of our channels are defined so now we look how many by the way how many channels we're not using there's quite a few left in here in this module we're only really using a fraction of them and we can go back on the menu you can go under control and then you can see exactly what's defined for both of the slots the slot 2 has another 77/100 in it if none of it is configured because we're not using it yet let's go back under the menu again and we can now define a scan because we have already defined channel 101 102 103 and 122 it has assumed that those are the ones we want to measure which makes sense we're going to go measure temperature from 101 102 then measure DC voltage then measure current then go all the way back it's going to do that once this is a really simple scan not very useful so we're going to create some modifications so that it can do what we wanted to do so under settings all of these things are there we can change the setting of each of these as I did before we already have defined those so we don't have to change them but we can change the scan properties so how many measurement you want to make well it's up to us but let's go ahead and measure a hundred points it's just an example now here we have a chance to define how long to wait between the measurements now we don't want to wait too long but we also don't want to do it very quickly because temperature is not going to change very fast these things have high thermal mass so there you go one second is probably enough one second is actually quite quick in a real situation you wouldn't measure it that fast anyway that everything looks good it gives you a scan duration which is computed based on how many measurements you have and how long between the measurements this is good but how do we start the measurement you can start up by pressing the trigger button or manually started but in reality in a measurement like this we want to only start it if the system has experienced an unusual temperature condition so that we can track the temperature when the fan comes on and look at the behavior of it like that so let's go on the trigger and define a trigger by the way there is just as many configuration capability here under this trigger menu as it was in the other one you can define some pretty incredible a complex set of conditions to start your measurement we're going to do a really simple one we're going to select to trigger based on a monitoring measurement so the instrument is going to monitor something in the background and when it hits the right condition then it's going to begin the scan in this case we're going to monitor channel 101 for temperature and then we can say the start condition is if it goes above a high limit and we can define a high limit to be let's say 30 degrees Celsius so if the temperature goes above 30 degrees Celsius it's going to start the measure that looks good you're gonna press ok so it's going to take a brief moment to configure everything and make sure it's all assigned to the correct places and it's ready so now we can go ahead and see if we can run our experiment let's go back to the home menu over here and right now we're not watching any of the channels it's sometimes useful to see the channel that you are interested in live on the screen so let's go ahead and select that we want to look at actually all of these channels so we can see them during the scan there you go so we have defined all the channels that we are watching and we can go under the scan menu and we can start our scan now before I started before I start the scan I want to make sure that we have the Conn turned on so that the resistors continue to get warm so I'm going to go ahead and start the scan and as soon as I do that you can see that the instrument is just waiting he is going pre-scan monitors so the temperature is not above 30 degrees Celsius so it doesn't need to actually begin the scan and we can see that it is measuring 1 out of 100 so it's waiting so let's go ahead and apply the current to the system and as soon as I apply the current to the system of course the temperature is going to start to rise as you can see now right now 22 degrees is perfectly fine 30 is still quite some time away so the system is going to wait and we're going to wait for it until we hit 30 degrees Celsius there you go waiting closer so the condition was a 30 we are almost there and there this as you can see as soon as we hit 30 degrees the measurement has begun and it's going through all the scan you can see all the measurements written over here is 101 102 103 you can see all the measurements live going forward so we're going to keep going and wait and see what happens there this you can see we have measurement 14 out of 100 and the temperature is going to continue to rise so let's see what happens as it gets closer and closer to the end and we're almost done 98 99 and 100 so there it is all the measurements are done so let's see what happened to the data there's a lot of ways to look at it of course by the way I had I was looking at the wrong channel over here but it doesn't matter because it was defined as the correct measurement even though I was looking at the channel I wasn't measuring it didn't really matter because the data is being stored anyway so I've changed it already so let's go in the menu and under the graph and we can look at the data in graph form which is the most useful and here we can change which data is highlighted and so there we can see the statistical behavior of a particular set of data so on 101 is the first channel that was the channel we were measuring the temperature of so that we can trigger the measurement you can see the minimum is at 30 degrees that's because that's when the measurement actually began that was our trigger condition and we can see it went all the way to 41 degrees but its behavior is very interesting because as you can see it goes up and up and up and then it flattens out at the very end it goes back up again so why is that well if you correlate it with channel 103 which is our fan you can see exactly why that has happened so right over here when the fan turns on you can see that the temperature plateaus because the fan is cooling it allowing a temperature to reach a different equilibrium and when the fan turns off again you can see the temperature rises so we can see the correlation between those two now the other channel the temperature continues to rise because the fan is not pointing to that point in the system so this is one way you could detect that your thermal solution in a rack for example is not adequate for all the different locations in that entire system this is one way to do and that's why people put multiple thermocouples in a complex structure so they can see the thermal behavior without having to model it for instance or or do much more complicated ways of figuring it out so this is very useful because we can see exactly the difference between those two temperatures now and we'll complete analysis for it for instance we can see that the minimum and the maximum at a temperature of channel one is between thirty and forty one and the minimum maximum is between thirty 146 so there is a six degree temperature shift between the two channels which is readily available from the statistical data now the last channel which is 122 is the current measurement now even though it looks flat over here that's because the scale is is quite a lot quite different for it but if you look over here you will be able to if I find the right place where the temperature rise but the current actually changed which I forget what it was now I think it's right over here you can see that the minimum when the maximum is about 50 or between about 40 milliamps of difference and that 40 milli amp of difference is the reason why this curve briefly changed shape let me see if I can zoom into it more there it is you can see there you go that's much easier to see now you can see that the temperature when the current went down a little bit and come back up and there's a minor shift in the slope of the two channels due to that that means that the system backed off how much current was being delivered to the resistors in order to reduce their power consumption so you can even catch these tiny differences in a measurement because we have obviously six and a half digits so it shouldn't be a problem at all then you can go back to looking at all of it at the same time as you can see there is so much to do when you can analyze the data and do statistical analysis and histograms and everything else that I talked about it's just really only scratches the surface but gives you an idea of what you can do directly on the unit remember I have not used the computer this is all done purely on the instrument itself and we're going to take a look at the PC software too but having an instrument that can do so much on its own built into the operating system that's consistent between all the models of all the source mirrors and multimeters is a really big undertaking by Keithley and I think it's going to pay off and here we have the kickstart software which is a platform designed to communicate with all of keith Lee's instruments to extract information and do automation so you could use this software instead of using the screen itself on the instrument to do the same kind of tasks and extract information directly on the PC the advantage of this is that with the TSP interface or multiple instruments on LAN or USB you can have a list of units here on the left and then you can extract information from them in tandem and link them to each other for different triggering events and so on so it can be quite powerful once it's configured see here I have connected a key 6510 to the PC using USB if I double click on that I get an option of choosing what I want to do with it the DMM would be just a basic digital multimeter function I'm gonna go to a data logger to show you kind of a similar way of doing what we just did using the instrument itself so once you do that then you must you select that you're going to get this window here and in this window you can then select all the channels you can see all the channels that are available here on the right side so let's go ahead and slate select channel 1 so as soon as I do that I will get all the settings of that channel by the way the reason this computer is running so slowly is because it's connected to and recording at the same time so it's not because the software itself is slow so you're gonna say I wanna measure DC voltage and then I get this little window these are exactly the same settings that the instrument gives you one thing I like that it has is that you can do a instant measurement on the channel you have selected to get an idea of what it is you're actually doing so if you don't know if you have you know 30 channels or 40 channels connected you want to find out what it is you're measuring this helps you do that you can then add additional channels and then click get let's say AC voltage from the next one and then you can continue building this up and once you're done with that you save it and of course after that then you can create a scan here I have any immediate scan that so you want to make I don't know ten measurements pretty easy and then we press play you can see it's going to go through and make different measurements now because we're amazing measuring one AC and one DC when he goes to AC measurement it takes a little bit more time for it to settle and auto zero and do all the things that the instrument needs to do there you go it's going through all the different measurements you have a progress here at the bottom and then after it is done you can look at your result write it on the table for math use the table format is a channel 101 your the time stamp there's the value channel to value we can look at a graph and look at all the different things it's really nice now kickstarted is no longer free I believe it used to be free but I think it costs up to about five hundred dollars or so depending on where you live in order to do this automation it's basically a competitor to benchvue from keysight so it's kind of a complementary software allowing you to do a similar kind of thing but it is designed specifically for keith instruments and optimized for communicating with them definitely check this out if you want to have a PC with many instruments I've gone through the kickstart software before this is not version 2 so they have updated it quite a bit and I've also shooting this scripting language I'm not going to the details of that today but we can see how you can write your own code and it can become really really powerful and create an entire automation system doing production line or a research work that you might want to do in the laboratory so it's pretty pretty comprehensive definitely check it out and as the last thing we have to take a look at the apps button since Keithley has dedicated one button just for it obviously they're very serious I'm taking these apps right into the next level there's a couple of apps that are written already an instrument comes with them but the idea here is to develop more and more complex ones that can do more interesting things and a couple of examples are very basic but for instance that the clock you know you will run that it will get just a little clock that's kind of cute and you can then create more graphically interesting things a couple of ideas they had was for instance to create an app that you can put a picture in and then put the location of all your sensors on the picture so you can see exactly hotspots in your chassis these are kind of interesting as visual free times doing your measurement something else that's useful that shipped with it is this relay account and this relay account that tells you how many times it relays in your modules have been actuated this is really useful because can it can tell you how long you have until the module is essentially used up and you have to get a new one kind of gets you prepared for the future you can view slot 1 which is the start that I've been using a lot you can see some of the relays for example relay 1 or 2 has been actuated over 1,300 times so that's you know getting up there slowly but of course you have a hundred thousand measurements you can do so it's not like it's going to die anytime soon but nonetheless this is pretty useful we can end that up as well and go under the apps and other things you can have a grid this is also really handy if you define summation I don't have any measurements defined in here as you can see you have to start up a scan first but once you set up a scan you can then go ahead let's say I'm going to look at measure this one and then that's a DC voltage or whatever it is and then I can go back to the apps and run this grid again and you can see it says 101 over there and then you can start a scan if I say yes okay it measures it and then it shows you what's there this is really useful you can have a grid of all of your measurements going on live so this app can be pretty handy and I'm hoping that other apps can bring mathematical analysis and FFTs and other kind of interesting manipulation of data as you live measure them into the app ecosystem too which is pretty useful so I suggest you definitely take a look at that because there's also a fuse checker in here which is quite nice too tells you which fuse is dead by doing some internal testing this is a nice introduction of this perhaps we do some more video and explanation of these apps at at different time but just wanted to point to it so you know that it is also available and there you have it I hope you enjoy this extensive look at the Keithley da Q 6510 and that you learn something about how this instrument works if you want to support this channel you can always do it through patreon and subscribing of course but you can also let the different manufacturers know that you watch these videos and that you use them to decide what instruments to buy I do reviews across all manufacturers equally when it gives a nice third view perspective of how they perform in some real-life applications and allowing the vendors know that you take these videos into consideration allows me to have a good relationship with them so I can continue to bring you the latest and greatest instruments to review well I hope you enjoyed this I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: The Signal Path

Views: 25,553

Rating: 4.9405713 out of 5

Keywords: data acquisition system, Keithley, DMM, daq6510 keithley, DMM6510, Tektronix, Teardown, Exeriments, Review, Keithley 7700, Multimeter, Sampling, High-Resolution, Digitizer, Thermal Management, Thermal Monitor, The Signal Path, Low Noise Measurement, Fan Control

Id: Lezd27BzQLo

Length: 48min 46sec (2926 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 28 2019