I got my scope a day before my BDay FTW! Bought it here in the US from
http://www.tequipment.net/ with no issues using FedEx Ground. Opened up first and second inside box and pulled it out. Looked excellent in person. Calibrated one of the probes with success and dove right in. Decided to pull out my 3 yr old Basic Stamp Board of Education kit and run through their Understanding Signals book which thankfully is available for free online!
Understanding Signals PDFBout to go to bed but I ran through high and low signals with BS2, servo square waves, and sign waves with the piezo circuit. It took a few minutes some times to find the controls on the Rigol that the Parallex tut was talking about...Then again, the tut is based on their USB Osc. While I was playing around with it I was smacked in the face by a very large trout when I realized just how much better this Osc is compared to Parallex's USB Osc. You can tell if you look at the crappy PC software graphs in the PDF compared to the Rigol. OMG a whole hell of a lot more detail! Buy a real scope if you are a newb like me and can afford it. Thx Dave for saving me from the POS USB scopes and a very bad investment.
I mean this bitch is just beautiful for a first scope! Was totally worth the $400 just to learn how to use a tool I have never touched before. I would recommend not touching the Auto button if you get one...as you should learn something first (that is my personal rule anyways...make sure you burn after reading!). Also, if the Rigol is your very first scope, put off the urge to hack it to 100MHz. DO NOT screw with the firmware until you understand how the damn thing works..unless you have an extra $400...I don't plan to anyway. I figure if I learn how to use it, hack it, and brick it...at least I got my $400 out of it since i learned something. Just my two cents so you can get your four extra brain connections and now sex is on the brain...hrm! Anyways...My plan involves fully exploring 50MHz, finding out where the limits are so I understand why I should hack to 100Mhz, and in the meantime, collecting data and files from EEVBlog about the hack for the next 2-3 months before I attempt the it just to make sure I don't brick a $400 piece. May each user's road vary and ultimately stumble upon success?!?
Two pics of the Basic Stamp Piezo experiment running with the Rigol hooked up. Looks sexy!
http://www.tekcrack.com/downloads/eevblog/rigol1.jpghttp://www.tekcrack.com/downloads/eevblog/rigol2.jpgGoals:
Step 1: I need to learn this girl!
Step 2: I have 6 pieces of hardware to repair and friends bringing their broken stuff to play with! Wo0t!
Step 3: Use combined knowledge to leverage Rigol against my embedded circuit designs.
Thanks Dave for your great videos and forum and thx to the EEV community for making my first scope purchase a great success!