ow

CLI and MCP stdio server for Owon SDS-series oscilloscopes. Capture screenshots and waveforms over LAN; expose the same operations to LLMs so an agent can debug hardware directly.

Verified against an SDS7102V; should work for the rest of the SDS series.

Install

make install     # → ~/.local/bin/ow

Requires Swift 6.2+, macOS 26+.

Usage

ow config set host 10.0.1.230
ow status                     # identify the scope, print current waveform info
ow screen out.png             # capture display (BMP→PNG conversion if .png)
ow data out.bin               # capture waveform via STARTBIN
ow memdepth out.bin           # capture deep-memory waveform via STARTMEMDEPTH
ow bin --csv out.bin          # parse + summarize, write out.csv next to it
ow mcp                        # run as MCP stdio server

Run ow --help or ow <subcommand> --help for details.

MCP

ow mcp

Speaks JSON-RPC over stdio. Four tools:

• scope_status — probe + identify
• capture_screenshot — returns PNG inline (so an LLM can view it)
• capture_waveform — capture + parse, with deep_memory, include_samples, decimate options
• parse_bin_file — parse a saved .bin from disk

Drop the binary in your MCP client config — e.g. for Claude Desktop:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ow": { "command": "/Users/you/.local/bin/ow", "args": ["mcp"] }
  }
}

Protocol

The Owon SDS network protocol is reverse-engineered — the vendor manual does not document it. See PROTOCOL.md for the byte-level reference. The scope does not speak SCPI; there is no remote-control surface, only capture-and-analyze.

License

MIT (see LICENSE).