Parsing binary .wfm files created by Rigol scopes

Background

This project is should be a one-stop location for interpreting waveform .wmf files from any Rigol scopes. Programs that parse Rigol's binary .wfm files are sadly balkanized: each project tends to support a single scope model and the available efforts are spread across a wide range of languages.

Most seem to avoid do not deal specifically with the .wfm format and if they do, then only one specific scope model is supported.

Initially, I too, was only interested in a single scope format (DS1102E) and I successfully used the python parser written by Blaicher https://github.com/mabl/pyRigolWFM. Later, I noticed that 1000Z files were supported by the Szkutnik https://github.com/michal-szkutnik/pyRigolWfm1000Z and added support for these scopes. Later, I found the DS1000D Matlab code by Wagenaars https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/18999-read-binary-rigol-waveforms. Eventually, I ran across the work on DS4000 files by Cat-Ion https://github.com/Cat-Ion/rigol-ds4000-wfm.

This last project leveraged Kaitai Struct https://kaitai.io as a domain specific language to represent the binary files. Once the binary waveform files have been described as a .ksy files then parsers can be generated for a wide range of languages (C++/STL, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Lua, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby). Moreover, Kaitai Struct has a Web IDE https://ide.kaitai.io that allows one to interactively reverse engineer binary file formats. This is super helpful for those Rigol .wfm formats that are undocumented.

Status

There is a bit of work remaining (testing, validation, repackaging) but at least there are now binary file descriptions for .wfm files created by

• DS1000C untested
• DS1000E tested
• DS1000Z tested, wonky voltages
• DS4000 tested
• DS6000 untested

This has been a bit of an adventure. In the process of nailing down the basic formats, I have gleaned information from a wide range of projects started by others.

• Shein's Pascal program https://sourceforge.net/projects/wfmreader
• Wagenaars's Matlab script https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/18999-read-binary-rigol-waveforms
• Steele's C program http://nsweb.tn.tudelft.nl/~gsteele/rigol2dat
• Blaicher python code https://github.com/mabl/pyRigolWFM
• Szkutnik python code https://github.com/michal-szkutnik/pyRigolWfm1000Z
• Cat-Ion python code https://github.com/Cat-Ion/rigol-ds4000-wfm
• A LabView program I got from Rigol support
• Rigol's own documentation for 1000Z and 6000 file formats.

Usage

Right now the first version of python module that supports 1000E and 1000Z formats (this is the pre-Kaitai Struct version!) can be installed via pip::

pip install RigolWFM

Once this is done, one can extract signals from binary Rigol .wfm files by::

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import RigolWFM.wfm as rigol

w = rigol.Wfm.from_file('OneChannelFile.wfm', 'DS1000E')
ch = w.channel[0]
plt.plot(ch.times, ch.volts)
plt.show()

w = rigol.Wfm.from_file('TwoChannelFile.wfm', 'DS1000Z')
for ch in w.channels:
    plt.plot(ch.times, ch.volts, label=ch.name)
plt.legend(loc='top right')
plt.show()