rigol2spice

A program to convert Rigol oscilloscope's .CSV files to a format readable by LTspice.

Your Rigol oscilloscope can output .CSV files that capture a waveform, this program reads the .CSV file and converts it to a PWL (piecewise linear) format.

YouTube demo/instructions

How to use (simple)

1. Acquires waveform on your machine, after you have acquired a waveform, use the Storage key to save it to CSV file format and store it on a pen drive. Note that you can have more than one channel in a CSV file, but a PWL file can only have one signal. Also, large captures will take a long time to be processed both this program and LTSpice.

2. Download or compile the program from the releases (binaries provided only for Windows x64 at the moment) and decompress the files to a folder in your computer (e.g. C:\rigol2spice), make sure you remember the folder you decompressed the files to.

3. To Run, insert the pen-drive on your PC, open Windows's command prompt and execute the program with the argument being the path to the .CSV file, e.g. if your pen-drive is the D: drive and the file-name is NewFile1.csv:

   C:\rigol2spice\rigol2spice.exe D:\NewFile1.csv

   The program will run and will output the PWL data points to the standard output (screen). If you want to save to a file, use the > operator and specify the name of the file, e.g.:

   C:\rigol2spice\rigol2spice.exe D:\NewFile1.csv > D:\PWLFile.txt

   To see how long your capture lasts, open the generated file in a text editor and check the last line.

4. Load the file in LTSpice. Insert a voltage or current source in your design, right click on the component and click the Advanced button, in the dialog that appears. Select PWL FILE option and click the Browse button to select your PWL file. LTSpice should parse the file and use your waveform in the simulation.

How to use (multiple channels)

First, note that a Rigol .CSV file can have information of multiple channels, but a LTspice PWL file can have only one channel.

By default, the program reads only the CH1 channel. To see what channels a .CSV contains, run the program with the -a flag:

C:\rigol2spice\rigol2spice.exe -a D:\NewFile2.csv

The output:

Channels:
    CH1 (unit: Volt)
    CH2 (unit: Volt)
Time step: 0.00000000005

Now if you want to use the CH2, run the program with the --channel option, then a space, then the channel name, note that channel names are CaSe-SeNsItIvE for this program:

C:\rigol2spice\rigol2spice.exe --channel CH2 D:\NewFile2.csv > D:\CH2.txt

Usage reference

USAGE: rigol2spice <filename> [--channel <channel>] [--analyse]

ARGUMENTS:
<filename>              The filename of the .csv file from your oscilloscope

OPTIONS:
-c, --channel <channel> The label of the channel to be processed (case
                        sensitive) (default: CH1)
-a, --analyse           Analyse the file's header and quit
-h, --help              Show help information.

Building

To build this program, it's just a simple Swift package, you should be able to build it with a simple on macOS, Windows or Linux:

swift build

Legal

I'm not affiliated with Rigol and this is not a project related to Rigol Technologies, Inc.