User manual

Publication No. 980935 Rev. M 3152B User Manual
Astronics Test Systems ArbConnection 4-57
The Pulse
Composer
The Pulse Composer is a tool for creating and editing pulses
without the need to think about sample clock, number of points and
complex equations. Pulses are created on the scre
en, simply and
efficiently in a special dialog box by typing in the width and level, or
by using the “rubber band” method to place straight line segments
with the exact amplitude and time duration. The Pulse Composer
can also multiply pulse sections to cre
ate pulse duplication along
lengthy time intervals.
When you finally have your pulse design on the screen the program
determines if the pulse design will fit in one memory segment or use
multiple segments and employ the sequence generator for
repeatable se
gments. In either case, bear in mind that if you
already have some waveforms stored in memory segments, these
will be erased to make room for the new pulse design. If you insist
on keeping arbitrary waveforms and still download complex pulses,
you can chec
k the “Force pulse to one segment” option and the
3152B
will do some extra “muscle flexing” to fit the pulse as
required.
To launch the Pulse Composer point and click on the Pulse tab in
the Panels bar. Figure 4-43 shows an example of the Pulse
Composer. T
he Pulse Composer has three main sections:
Commands bar, Toolbar and Waveform screen.
Refer to Figure 4-43 throughout the descriptions to follow.
The Pulse Composer
Menu
Bar
The Pulse Composer menu
bar provides access to standard
Windows commands such as
File and View. In addition, there are
ArbConnection-
specific commands such as Edit, Wave and
System.
In general, clicking on one of the menus pulls down a list of
commands. Clicking on a listed command may then either open a
dialog box or generate an imme
diate action. For example, clicking
on File and then Exit will cause the immediate termination of the
Pulse Composer.
The various commands in the Commands bar are
listed and described below.
File
Menu
The File menu has 4 menu items that control pulse wav
eform file
operations.
This menu also can be used to print the active
waveform or to exit from Pulse Composer. Descriptions of the menu
selections from the File pull-down menu are given below.
New
The New (Ctrl+N) menu item clears the pulse
graph. Changes
made to the pulse graph should be saved before using the New
function because it is destructive to the displayed pulse.