wfm2read.m

Reads the wfm binary files written by Tektronix Performance Oscilloscope instrument families.

Description

Read Y(t) data from new format Tektronix WFM files (tested up to WFM003 format) used by TEKTRONIX instrument families
MSO70000/C, DSA70000/B/C, DPO70000/B/C, DPO7000,
MSO/DPO5000, TDS5000/B, TDS6000/B/C, TDS/CSA7000/B

wfm2read now supports Fast Frames data.

The oscilloscopes can save to ASCII files, but this is poor, very slow and needs lots of disk memory. The binary wfm files are much faster and smaller and even contain more information.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the following in the creation of this submission:
Tektronix binary file readers
This submission has inspired the following:
Read Yokogawa *.wvf files

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.0.4 (R14SP2)
• Other requirements: Restrictions: Only YT-waveforms can be read (X-Y not tested yet)

[youth flexa]

 

[harm twaalfrink]

 

[dwid krueger]

good

[Bernd H]

exactly what I needed.

[Markus Kuhn]

Warning: Modern Linux versions use UTF-8 as the default character encoding, and on these, MATLAB's fread with "char" will sometimes read more than 1 byte at a time. This can cause this routine (version 1.4, 2005-11-11) to fail badly.

Fix: Replace the line

  [fid,message]=fopen(filename);

with

  [fid,message]=fopen(filename, 'r', 'ieee-be', 'latin1');

to declare explicitly a single-byte character encoding (here: ISO 8859-1 Latin-1), to always guarantee that 1 fread-char = 1 byte. (Or use uint8 instead of char in fread.)

[Themos Kallos]

Very useful file, works great.

[Paul Lundquist]

This program generally works but does not read fastframe data, which is a major limitation.

[Jack J]

need change to be compatible w/ WFM#003.

[John Baillie]

Hi,
I've modified the example file to read data in the file test.wvf which is located in the current MATLAB directory. I get the following error:

??? Undefined function or variable 'test'.

Error in ==> wvf_logicsignals_example at 4
[y_logic,t] = wvfread(test, 5, 1); %

What am I doing wrong?
scope model: DL7480

[Erik Benkler]

Dear John Bailie,

it seems that your comment refers to wvfread, not to wfm2read, where you have posted it. Anyway, you just missed the quotation marks around the file name, so you should write
[y_logic,t] = wvfread('test', 5, 1);

Best regards,
Erik

[Brian]

Works great, thanks for doing this. One small bug: it always seems to report the same sampling rate, 10 GS/s (and the scope, a TDS7054, only does 5GS/s max), regardless of the actual rate. This may be a software problem in the scope though, because the MATLAB .hdr header file shows the same when you save files in the MATLAB .dat file format

[Toru]

 

[Toru]

Works great, Thank you.

I found a small error in line 228.

> ed1.user_offset = fread(fid,1,'*double',byteorder);

[ranjith kumar]

 

[Matt]

 

[Dan]

Works well. I appreciate the info structure. y-data agrees with Teks batch converter out to 7 decimal places and then, as with wfm_ascii_dpo, it adds some noisey data. This nusance appears to be related to reading of the scale and offset values from the file. Thank you for a very good tool.