Customized Output Data Format for Impedance Sweeps

April 16, 2021 by Tim Ashworth

This short blog post shows you how to customize the exported data of your impedance sweeps on the MFIA and the MFLI with the MF-IA option.

The Sweeper module of LabOne^® is an excellent tool to sweep frequency, amplitude or bias offset, and measure multiple parameters as a function of the swept parameter. The Sweeper offers numerous ways of exporting your data, such as .CSV, .MAT, HDF5, .TXT and even vector or bitmap graphics straight from the chart. In addition to this, the MFIA and MFLI with MF-IA option offer an additional format which can be customised to include only the parameters of interest. This additional format is called "ZView (*.txt)" can be selected in the history tab of the Sweeper, highlighted in Figure 1a. In its default setting, the format supports the third-party equivalent circuit modelling package ZView from Scribner Associates. However, the format can be modified to suit your data needs and can easily be rolled back to the original ZView format.

Figure 1: Screenshot of the LabOne user interface showing the Sweeper module and the File Manager. The file format is highlighted by orange lozenge (a) and the template file in orange lozenge (b).

The first step is to initiate the ZView format template by running a sweep and saving it in the ZView format. This produces a template file called "savefile_template.txt" in the Setting folder. See figure 1, (b). You can download this template file, edit it in a text editor and upload. Once uploaded all data saved under the ZView format will follow this template. If you would like to roll back to the original template, just delete the template in the LabOne File Manager and re-save a ZView sweep.

In Figure 1, we can see an example of a customised saving template in the File Preview window of the LabOne File Manager. This file shows rows of header text, including the column names, and below the required parameters to save. When you save a sweep, you can find it in the Measurement/Session folder of the File Manager as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Screenshot of the LabOne File Manager. The text file can be viewed in the File Preview window on the right-hand side.

If you take multiple sweeps in the Sweeper module, each sweep will be one entry in the History tab. By choosing "Auto Save" at the bottom of the history tab, each sweep will be appended to the text file. This is great for when you need a single file containing multiple sweeps.

This flexible format is a great way to customise the file format of the data output of impedance sweeps. The resulting text file is in plain text and can be read by third-party software for further processing. If you have any questions about this, or any other aspect of impedance measurements, get in touch.

Appendix: Text of Template

Here is the text of the template shown in Figure 1.

Custom format output header
Experiment Type: Sweep Frequency, record multiple parameters
Date: ${month}-${day}-${year}
Time: ${hours}:${minutes}:${seconds}
Data Points: ${numpoints}

Frequency(Hz) Test_Signal (V) Bias_Voltage(V) real_Z(Ohm) imag_Z(Ohm) abs_Z(Ohm) phase_Z(Rad) Parallel_Res(Ohm) Parallel_Cap(F) Row_number Timestamp Time(sec)
End Comments
${frequency} ${drive} ${bias} ${realz} ${imagz} ${absz} ${phasez} ${param0} ${param1} ${timestamp} ${counter} ${time_sec}