Converts binary files exported from the Siglent SDS-1000X-E series oscilloscope into the Sigrok format. This allows you to view the waveforms in PulseView, which is free and open-source.

You can export the waveform in this format using the Save/Recall button to a thumbdrive if you are working at a remote location, or over LAN if you connect your scope to the network. The binary format is the fastest and most convenient way to work wih the captured data because it is compact and fast to export, within 1-2 seconds and about 14 MB (1 byte per sample) in size.

If you really want to, you can manually extract the data from offset 0x800 as unsigned bytes (128 as the middle zero point). What this utility does is to also convert the values to the actual voltage values and time-scale from the metadata. This saves you several steps from cutting the binary file to setting up the raw import in PulseView.

Siglent also provides a Windows tool from the scope's web UI to convert the binary file to a CSV file, but being a non-standard intermediate file is not helpful -- it is large (~300 MB!) and there are no tools to directly analyze, visualize or operate on it.

Install Go and run the following command:

go get -v github.com/geekman/siglent-bin2sr

The source code and its dependencies will be downloaded and a binary built at $GOPATH/bin.

Alternatively, pre-built binaries may be available under the Releases section.

siglent-bin2sr [options... | -h] <input-file>

where the options are:

• -raw for a raw float32 file
• -10x to multiply values when used with a 10X probe

If the sample rate is too high (i.e. there are too many points), it can be reduced using -decimate option. A decimation factor of 2 only counts 1 out of every 2 samples, effectively reducing the amount of samples by half. Similarly a factor of 10 reduces the number of samples by 1/10th.

The output filename is fixed:

• $FNAME-raw.bin if a raw file is requested, or
• $FNAME.sr otherwise

• There seems to be some slight voltage offset. I haven't yet determined whether this is due to my incorrect understanding of the binary file values, or the scope is exporting incorrect values.

• There's no indication when a 10X probe is used, so this needs to be applied manually using the -10x flag.

I did not want to invest too much time into reversing the format as it is not guaranteed to be "stable" by Siglent and may change in future. The file format also does not contain any signatures (magic bytes) to uniquely identify it.

If you do know what's wrong or how to solve these problems, please let me know, or better yet, file a pull request on GitHub. I wanted this tool to just be sufficiently usable.

siglent-bin2sr is licensed under the 3-clause ("modified") BSD License.

Copyright (C) 2020-2021 Darell Tan

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
3. The name of the author may not be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

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