Pixelpulse2

Pixelpulse is a powerful user interface for visualizing and manipulating signals while exploring systems attached to affordable analog interface devices, such as Analog Devices' ADALM1000.

Fully cross-platform using the Qt5 graphics toolkit and OpenGL accelerated density-gradiated rendering, it provides a powerful and accessible tool for initial interactive explorations.

Intuitive click-and-drag interfaces make exploring system behaviors across a wide range of signal amplitudes, frequencies, or phases a trivial exercise. Just click once to source a constant voltage or current and see what happens. Choose a function (sawtooth, triangle, sinusoidal, square) - adjust parameters, and make waves.

Zoom in and out with your scroll wheel or multitouch gestures (on supported platforms). Hold "Shift" to for Y-axis zooming.

Click and drag the X axis to pan in time.

Screenshot

Getting Pixelpulse2

Easy

• OSX - Navigate to the releases and collect the latest pixelpulse2-bundled.dmg.zip package. The latest testing build is available from Travis-CI.
• Windows - For a testing build, download the dependency package and the latest binary build from appveyor. For an official release build, navigate to releases and collect the latest pixelpulse2-setup.exe.
• Linux - Build from source (below)

Advanced

To build from source on any platform, you need to install a C++ compiler toolchain, collect the build dependencies, setup your build environment, and compile the project.

If you have not built packages from source before, this is ill-advised.

• Build and install libsmu (https://github.com/analogdevicesinc/libsmu)
• Install Qt5.4.
• On most Linux Distributions, Qt5 is available in repositories. The complete list of packages required varies, but includes qt's support for declarative (qml) UI programming, qtquick, qtquick-window, qtquick-controls, and qtquick-layouts.
• Binary installers are available from the Qt project for most platforms.

To build / run on a generic POSIX platform

git clone https://github.com/signalspec/pixelpulse2
cd pixelpulse2
mkdir build
cd build
qmake pixelpulse2.pro -qt=qt5
make

On Windows the qmake command should look like this

qmake pixelpulse2.pro "LIBSMU_LIBRARY = path_to_libsmu_dll" "LIBSMU_INCLUDE_PATH = path_to_libsmu_include_folder" -qt=qt5

After it is finished building, you have to copy the libsmu shared library into the build folder and Pixelpulse2 should be ready to use with your M1K

To build / install for Debian, from the pixelpulse2 directory:

dh_make -p pixelpulse2_0.8 -s -c blank --createorig
dpkg-buildpackage
sudo dpkg -i ../pixelpulse2_0.1-1_i386.deb

To build / run on Ubuntu 15.04, via shabaz on Farnell.

• Please note that you make encounter issues if you are running a version of Ubuntu lower than 15.04, because the version of QT in the repositories will likely be less than 5.4 (this also applies if you are running a Linux distribution that uses an older version of Ubuntu, for example Linux Mint 17.1, which uses Ubuntu 14.04.)

• Get ready

  sudo apt-get update

• Build and install libsmu (https://github.com/analogdevicesinc/libsmu)

• Download and install Qt5.4

  wget http://qtmirror.ics.com/pub/qtproject/development_releases/qt/5.4/5.4.0-rc/qt-opensource-linux-x64-5.4.0-rc.run
  chmod 755 qt-o*
  ./qt-opensource-linux-x64-5.4.0-rc.run

• Install a couple extra Qt modules

  sudo apt-get install qtdeclarative5-controls-plugin
  sudo apt-get install qtdeclarative5-quicklayouts-plugin
  sudo apt-get install qtdeclarative5-dev

• Change your default configuration file

  sudo su
  cd /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt-default/qtchooser
  ls -l
  rm default.conf
  ln -s ../../../../share/qtchooser/qt5-x86_64-linux-gnu.conf default.conf
  ls –l
  exit

• Make a new folder, clone the pixelpulse library into it from git, and build it!

  mkdir development
  cd development
  git clone https://github.com/signalspec/pixelpulse2
  cd pixelpulse2
  mkdir build
  cd build
  qmake pixelpulse2.pro ..
  make

• Make sure your M1K is plugged into your computer. The onboard LED should light up when it is connected. You can double-check by typing lsusb. You should see something along the lines of ID 064b:784c Analog Devices, Inc. (White Mountain DSP)

• You should be ready to launch Pixelpulse2. First, go to the directory it was built in:

  cd ~/development/pixelpulse2/build

• Run Pixelpulse2 as root

  sudo ./pixelpulse2