Brand new to scopes - Hantek 6022BL has square waves with nothing connected?

[rawrs]

Hi guys,

I'm brand new to oscilloscopes, and still fairly new to electronics. I've only used oscilloscopes a couple of times in my entire life, and it was an old Rigol unit at Hackerspace. Yesterday I found a brand new (plugged in once or twice) Hantek 6022BL scope one suburb away from me, and I couldn't help biting the bullet and buying it.

After installing the standard software, I plugged the probe into the cal port, and it looked like it was giving a perfect 1MHz square wave, with 5v P-P. Only a... couple of problems with this.

Problem the first: that calibration terminal spits out 1KHz, not 1MHz. And it's 2v peak-to-peak, not 5v. ...and it will produce these square waves, on both channels, with nothing connected. There is nothing on the BNC's at all. I've been tearing my hair out all night, and all morning, trying to get this thing to do something meaningful, and I've reinstalled drivers countless times. Also, probing the points with a multimeter produces no meaninfgul results, either.

I tried to install OpenHantek, which fails with the following error:

Code: [Select]

libpng warning: iCCP: known incorrect sRGB profile
Which is a very weirdo error to be getting for an oscilloscope program. I tried throwing software at the problem to make it go away, but to no avail. I did manage to wrap my tiny mind around sigrok/PulseView, though, and the driver does work, and it seems to upload the correct firmware when the scope starts. It seems to, but I honestly don't know. I'm brand new to scopes, and I have no idea what's going on here.

I will try on a different computer after I post this, and will see how I go. But I've done all the usual things, fiddled with the buttons, taken the thing apart to see if anything obvious was amiss, nothing is, nothing has a hole in it, nothing appears wrong. The scope starts, and the LED goes from flashing red to flashing green when "in operation", nothing appears to be wrong, but the scope isn't really doing anything that I can suss out either.

I'm honestly lost. I'll be heartbroken if this scope is a dud, because I've literally wanted an oscilloscope for about 10 years now, it's been at the top of the electronics wishlist for many, many years, and now that I finally have one, I can't get any chooch out of it.

Any ideas? I really hope I'm just doing something wrong.

Thanks in advance, and I do look forward to contributing to these forums now that I'm getting into electronics more.

Cheers,
Rory

[bson]

It seems to have a calibration function in one of the menus.  Maybe you ran this by accident?  If not, try running it after the scope has warmed up for 20min.

Also, check the coupling setting and see if switching it between AC/DC/GND makes any difference.

If you probe something, does it show up?  Like a terminal of a blinking LED on an Arduino or something.

Make sure the software finds the USB device and isn't running in some demo mode.

[alsetalokin4017]

Please provide a screenshot when the scope is showing the square wave with nothing connected. Not just the waveform display but the scope's setting parameters also.


As far as the libpng warning goes, google that exact string and there is a lot of information there. Seems to be a bug in libpng >= v1.6. Does it prevent the software from working? It shouldn't, I think. But then I'm not Hantek.

But please please don't be heartbroken if it turns out not to work. It's barely more than a toy scope anyway. If you are going to be serious about electronics... well, you know the "entry level" DSOs that are usually recommended here.

[rawrs]

It works!

Ok, on the server. But it works! I'm not sure what I did on Windows 10, but on Windows Server 2016 (which is running on a NUC), I installed PulseView and only PulseView, did the "install drivers twice" thing, and it worked straight away. There is still a little bit of weirdness, the waveform on the calibration connector is only about 1v peak to peak, which was confirmed by my multimeter (UT181A), but it's pretty much bang on 1KHz, also confirmed by multimeter, and it is a nice actual square wave. The other channel not in use has a standard noise floor with nothing plugged in, like you would expect.

Here is the screenshot, as requested. All the settings I'm using are default, here. I'm just saying 'go', and that's it. I didn't think to get a screenshot of it working on the NUC, but really, there's nothing to see there, I don't think. It's functioning as a perfectly normal scope on that machine.

At a pure guess, and nothing more, it's fairly obvious there's something going on with the driver, but from my understanding, it seems like the software uploads the firmware to the scope every time it boots? And considering the firmware looks to be all of 15KB, that's not a bad way to do it, I guess? But it appears as if the scope is not getting this firmware, or not getting it properly, and it's just running in this garbage mode as a result. I'm going to strip every single last piece of software I can, anything to do with scopes and measurement, including my UT181 software, all of it, and I will report back. Otherwise it looks like I'll have to reinstall Windows... again.

Either way, this is a huge weight of my mind! At least I now know that the thing's not dead out of the box. Now I just have to figure out how to use it...

(*grumbles* I've had the Mac for a good 4 or 5 years now, and it's still on its original install. I've reinstalled windows 4 or 5 times in 12 months...)

Cheers again,
Rory

[alsetalokin4017]

Oh... Windows. No wonder.

[rawrs]

Tell me about it.

Backup done, ISO downloading, Windows about to be reinstalling. For the second time in 5 weeks. It's gonna be a fun night. Thank god for Ninite.

Cheers

[rawrs]

Welp, Windows is reinstalled, and the scope is working perfectly. I will mention one thing, in case anyone is googling this same problem.

You really need to pick your poison with regards to the Hanteks. Do you want the stock software, or do you want OpenHantek, or PulseView? Whatever software you pick is going to determine what driver and what firmware you will need. From my research, it appears that when these scopes boot, the bootloader will download the firmware from the computer every time, so the correct driver and firmware needs to be there. This firmware is all of 15KB or so, so it doesn't take long for this process to complete, but it needs to happen for the scope to work properly.

Whatever was going on, I think it wasn't loading the firmware properly. This will make sense because one of the problems I was having, the calibration probes weren't giving me anything with the multimeter - it's my understanding that these probes are active all the time, it's constantly spitting out a 1KHz, 2V P-P square wave. It would make sense that this isn't working when the firmware doesn't download properly to the scope. Plus, if you just plug this scope into power, it will appear to be dead. It's just a zombie - the lights are on, but nobody's home. Part of the boot process appears to be, to download the firmware, which the driver will spit at it when it boots.

So, problem solved! And I hope my first thread here helps someone else who might run into similar problems. Pick your software carefully!