PokIt App oscilloscope bugs (PokIt Pro)
Hi everyone.
I received today my device and after tinkering with it for a few hours, I noticed that the app has some serious issues.
1. not compatible with dark theme. In certain environments having the phone screen fully lit in white is really hurting (plus battery drains faster). Please add a dark theme ASAP
2. the oscilloscope is partly broken:
2a) when sampling, you can’t resize the graph in real time as in logger mode. You need to stop, resize/pan, re-sample
2b) when you stop sampling the trace just disappears. You have to open the “Mode” window (it only works with this one; the “trigger” or “menu” windows don’t do the trick) and then close the panel to magically make the just sampled trace reappear
2c) when moving the trigger level line, the label always displays “-0.0”, you never know the value you’re setting the trigger at, you can only judge it by its relative position on the graph
2d) sometimes the trigger just doesn’t work. I’ve been sampling an RS485 transmission for about one hour and without changing any setting, half the time I started sampling in “one shot” trigger mode, no graph would appear and the “sampling” rotating icon kept on spinning indefinitely. Just by stopping the sampling and restarting it immediately, the sampling would be successful
3) there a thick “blind” horizontal bar right in the middle of the front torch LED. It is dark exactly where you would need the light 🤔
4) in logger mode, after logging some data and using gestures to zoom in and out (it works in realtà time, contrary to what happens in oscilloscope mode) you can’t zoom in past a certain resolution (unit/div) on the vertical axis, even if it’s not the smallest step the Mode menu would let you select. On the contrary, if you keep zooming in, the unit/div count will start INCREASING (as if you were zooming out).
for example: I was logging the current a circuit board was absorbing from a stabilised power supply (140 mA) and I wanted to see the ripple width. As I zoomed in from 25 mA/div, when I reached 1.1 mA/div, the scaling started increasing again; so as I was further zoomed in, the scale read 2.3 mA/div even though I was zoomed in more than 1.1 mA/div 🤔
As a direct consequence, when I used the cursor to determine the amplitude of the ripple, the reading was completely different from what I expected by looking at the graph. For example, setting the cursors on two points where the difference in the current was about 1.5 div and the scale was indicating 1.1 mA/div, the solitude was shown to be 3.5 mA (which should have corresponded to more than 3 divs on the graph)
I haven’t tried in oscilloscope mode to see if there is the same zooming issue.
5. Sometimes during the measurement the app loses connection to the device. It is still connected to the phone’s Bluetooth antenna, but the app just can’t see it anymore. The only way I am able to get it back to work is completely shutting down the app and restarting it. Switching apps on the phone and moving PokIt to the background seems to trigger this almost every time. I left the app running for about 15 minutes with the device not measuring anything and as I got back to it, it worked immediately. On the contrary, when I was measuring the above mentioned Rs485 signal in oscilloscope mode and opened a notification from Teams to reply to my colleague, when I got back to the PokIt app, it worked for about one minute and then suddenly stopped: the trace rectangle at the bottom of the screen was no longer showing the current graph scale and the “start/stop sampling” round button was greyed out in the Devices screen I could see my PokIt Pro “connected” bug after a few seconds it showed “searching” and pressing the ON button on the device won’t do anything still the device was shown as “connected” in the phone’s Bluetooth setting page.
Tried on iPhone 12 Pro with iOS 15.4
I hope these issues will be fixed as soon as possible.
thank you for your time.
Marco
-
Hi there,
Thanks for all your feedback.
We will pass on the suggestion for dark mode to our software team.
We are aware of most of the oscilloscope bugs that you have mentioned and are working to fix them. I will follow up with the software team on the other issues you have mentioned.
In terms of the bar blocking the torch, are you able to provide us with a photo of what you mean?
I will let the software team know about the zooming bug as well as the connection bug. We have not experienced these in testing but we will try to fix it.
Once again thanks for the feedback.
0 -
I did some more testing on this. In logger or Oscilloscope mode we have this weird zoom bug (previously point n.4 in my list).
The rated zoom scale at the bottom of the screen (unit/div) artificially increases just by panning the screen up
Basically the zoom scale is accurate only as long as the center horizontal line is showing in the screen view. If you scroll the display up (by sliding your finger DOWN), as soon as the center line is moved off screen, the unit/div scale is artificially increased the more you pan the screen view.
So the actual scale of the graph is the one indicated when you have the center line on screen (say 2mV/div). If you then scroll up the screen several times, the graph you then see is still at a 2mV/div scale but the display is showing a higher value: 20 mV/div, 35 mV/div, 60 mV/div). The more you scroll, the higher the number shown even though the ACTUAL zoom factor is different.I have recorder a video of this behaviour, if you want I can send it by email so you can see it yourselves.
0 -
Also the logger does not show the trace value when touching the trace (as opposed to what happens in oscilloscope mode) neither shows it when you long-touch the screen to make time cursors appear (I was measuring temperature and the value shown on the cursor was always 0°C even though looking at the graph it was more than 24°C).
If I use the temperature sensor in multimeter mode, it shows 27°C.
The sensor is working, the logger is tracing the graph correctly but the value shown on the cursor is always 0.0 -
Hi Marco,
Thank you so much for your feedback.
The issues you have mentioned in the past 2 posts are known to us and we have working on fixing them.
Thanks
0 -
Great testing Marco. I've also experienced some of those but others work for me on my Samsung Note 9 Android phone so I wonder if many of your issues are specific to iOS. For example, in 2c above I do see a value in the trigger bar as I am moving it, not the "-0.0" you see.
0 -
Yes Shane. I suppose you're right and some issues are specific to the iOS version of the PokIT app.
I hope the update will be soon released. It's been a month already and I can't use my PokIT Pro for work related stuff because the measurements are unreliable due to some of these issues.
0 -
Finally got my 4. After 5 minutes of testing with the latest firmware, yes, I agree with the above mentioned bug list too. I can also add:
- low frequency oscillation (AC signal not centred on 0VDC) present on a good AC signal (230VAC outlet that has 0VDC offset).
- frequency/period calculation is totally incorrectly coupled to the sec/div setting. measuring the 230VAC outlet does not show 50Hz.
- moving the cursors interferes with the iPhone reserved area at the top for notifications/control centre - needs to be more user friendly.
- zooming needs to be resettable to the set sec/div, V/div settings.
- AC/DC coupling, scaling should be adjustable in free fun without needing to stop/start.
- DFT needs some meaningful axis scaling information (maybe even logarithmic?)
- MULTIMETER needs a simple low-pass/averaging filter on the resistance reading. holding leads together gives fluctuating results, but clamping them together correctly reads 0 ohms.
I also want to use this for professional and hobby work but can't rely on it in the current state. Looking forward to the updates.
0 -
I have to agree with Marco. The Oscilloscope mode is very buggy, especially while panning and zooming either a live capture or a historical one. It's really maddening that pinching and panning don't seem to result in what the user expects, at least with both a Samsung S10+ and S20+.
Additionally, there is a 5 - 10 second delay in the data being captured and being displayed on the screen. And it seems like the data is presented to the user one screen-width of data at a time with the mentioned 5 -10 second delay between screen updates. The wave form doesn't arrive in real-time.
0
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
8 comments