Bought my first oscilloscope a couple weeks ago, a Rigol DS1054 Z. And with some help from videos and blogs I am learning how to use it. While I have other things I plan to use it for, the reason that triggered buying it was to measure flicker in florescent and LED lighting. The reason I am testing them is that my niece suffers from seizures and after some reading I had to wonder if florescent or LED lights maybe contributing to the problem. Originally I thought just get some LED's that run on DC and the problem would be solved. It's not that easy, the 2 kinds I bought both flicker at 120 Hz, they are actually worse than florescent bulbs they were to replace. And after thinking about it, the LED's can be built without a good capacitor, so they may flicker. So basically now I am testing several different bulbs, fixtures and drivers.
So the issue is that the LED lights I am testing run between 12 and 36 volts, but to get the signal on my screen I am finding I have to spend several minutes turning the vertical position knob. I did eventually find that pressing the "Auto" button will put the signal in the middle of the screen, but it may set the vertical scale to 10mv, for example, so if I want to see it at 20mv I am back to spending a fair amount of time with the vertical position knob. In all the videos I watched it seemed to me that once they hooked up the test lead the signal was on their screen. Maybe that is the magic of editing but I doubt it as some do not cut way. So I am guessing either there is a setting I messed up at some point or there is another way that no one ever mentions when they are creating videos. So how do I get the oscilloscope to always keep the signal on the screen? Especially when I change the scale, but it would also be nice if it would also just automatically start out on the screen.
PS I hope this question is in the right place. These forums are very complicated to figure out. I have never seen forums setup like this.
