1) Can this DSO do transient analysis even with that tiny 32k sample buffer? At 20MS/s that's a minuscule slice of time, so on the surface it looks inadequate. But it very well could work somehow that I'm not aware of, in which case I'd be very, very interested to hear it.
Sorry for this slow reply - I've been distracted by $DAYJOB.
You can't use the DSO-101 for continuous sampling in the sense I think you mean: you'd have to read a 32K sample set, then tell it to go and get another one, and so on. But what does happen is that while it's waiting for a trigger condition, it will be continuously collecting samples and when the trigger occurs you'll have 16K samples from before the trigger, and 16K after it. In other words, that 32K is a circular buffer, and I think that's the key here.
The issue, then, is how to trigger the scope when the crash happens. You say you want to monitor both supply voltage and current, using the two channels. If you're doing that, then the only way to capture the event is to detect the crash, and send a manual trigger command to the scope when it happens. That would mean modifying the software. To go further with that idea, I'd need to know how you detect that a crash has occurred. As an example, though, I don't think it would be hard to modify the software to accept a signal from another program as a trigger command. The difficulty would be that there would be latency involved in such a system.
But if you were prepared to monitor just one of those variables at a time, then you could monitor it on channel A and trigger from channel B in single-shot mode, if channel B could be connected to some source that would act as a crash detector. That would be my favourite solution.
More generally: if you go to the Syscomp website at <a href="hhttp://www.syscompdesign.com/">
http://www.syscompdesign.com/</a> and look in the Downloads section, you'll find a link to my software as an ipk file, together with some descriptions. I haven't yet put the source code on there, mainly because I haven't yet got round to documenting the rather complicated build process. But I do confirm that I'm perfectly willing to share it for free. In fact, if you or anyone else wants to work with it, PM me and I'll send the source to you and work with you on the build process. That way, the documentation will get done. The build is a cross-build on a Linux desktop.
Also, I think if you contact Syscomp directly (the email address is on their website), you're likely to receive informed answers to questions related to (and not of course limited to) astronomy.
Obvious disclaimer: Syscomp are not responsible for any inaccuracies in this post.
Hope that helps.
