controlling an osciloscope with VB

Yesterday a couple of new Agilent scopes arrived, and I took one to play with. These are quite cheap scopes, their benefit being a combination of two analog and 16 digital (Logic Analyzer) channels.

I decided to see how this toy can be automated via a PC, and plugged it with a cross-cable to the COM port (the scope has two interfaces: GPIB and RS232).

Their CD contains a nice toolbar for Excel that lets you capture data from the scope into an Excel sheet/chart. What's more interesting, is the ActiveX control which allows to program the scope via VB, VBA and even VC++.

This is all nice, but I still haven't found a good use for it. In our test equipment (VXI) the scopes are fully automated via a programming languages, but the new scopes are needed for "manual" operation.