Recorder

The Recorder instrument is designed to show the time-history like the traditional strip chart recorder,but with enhanced display and analysis capabilities.

When you select Recorder instrument in the design or run mode, following settings will appear on left and right part of the screen:

Control properties

For detailed information about Recorder Control properties: grouping, number of column, Add / Remove, transparency,…see -> Control properties.

Recorder settings

Typical Recorder setting are:

Available appearance setting for Recorder instrument in Run mode are:

For detailed information about assigning / reassigning channels to/from Recorder -> see -> Display settings.

Recorder_with_additional_instruments

Appearance on screen

The Recorder element offers all important information:

  • channel name(s)
  • unit(s)
  • time information
  • zoom functions…

For detailed information about instruments positioning, size and transparency see  -> Screen edit functions.

Display type

Because the Recorder is typically used to show longer periods of time - minutes or even hours or days - it has the added ability to show data in one of several fashions: Real Data, RMS, or Average.

Recorder_display_type

This is useful when monitoring AC signals, which are going to look like a solid band when a long duration is shown - not very useful to look at (unless you‘re just looking for overall amplitude envelopes or obvious drop-outs). Changing the display type for this graph to RMS will show a more useful representation of the data.

For noisy DC signals, selecting Average can clean up the display. 

WARNING: Be aware that all these display types represent only statistic values for the online display. The settings have no influence on the other displays or the data storage.

Just have a look at the following screen where you can see the difference between the three display types.

Recorder_different_display_type

Use the Show events check-box to enable or disable view of event markers. You can also see all your events - keyboard, notice, and voice types - on the event list at the top right, directly below the replay control buttons.

For information about Events see -> Analyze -> Working with events.

Use the Interp. async channels check-box to interpolate the asynchronous channels. If an asynchronous data source like CAN is used, the values are interpolated between two sample points. But for digital signals (for example states) this is not wanted and with this option, we can disable the interpolation and the value will stay at the same level until next value is available.

Use the Draw sample points check-box to display individual sample points in analyse mode.

X-axis delta time

In measure mode you can define the presented delta-time on the Recorder widget.

Y-axis style

The Y-axis can be presented in different styles, that can be used at different applications.

Default option will add the y-axis for each assigned channel. Each channel can have their own scalling and zoom. When multiple channels are selected a lot of area is used to present all the y-axis.

Hidden option will hid the y-axis completely

Single value axis option set all active channels of a recorder to only one Y-axis. If set, all channels will use the same scaling and as a visual result, there will be only one axis with values left. This Signle-value axis option is very helpful when there is only small space for channel names and scaling and the channels use the same scaling.

Compact option will add the y-axis for each channel, but in a compact way so less area is used.

Improve visualization

When the time area is really long (X-axis) the recorder stats drawing the data from the intermediate buffer, which changes the signal visualization as only min,max values are shown.

To improve signal visualization please take a look at the following solution.