EEVblog #824 - GW Instek GDS-1000B Oscilloscope Teardown

[pascal_sweden]

No shielding
=========

Is there really no metal shielding in this scope, like you have in the Rigol and Siglent scopes?

In the Rigol and Siglent scopes, the shielding is massive, and you have to take it out, to even see a glimpse of the PCB board.

Also no shielding for the PSU itself. Why haven't they looked at Rigol and Siglent?

While the front-end input channels have shielding on the top PCB board, there is no shielding on the bottom of the PCB board for the front-end input channels? Is this really okey?

This scope looks like a toy, without any shielding!

Xilinx Zynq XC7Z010 evaluation board
===========================

Could it actually be that they just tossed in a standard Xilinx Zynq XC7Z010 evaluation board in this scope?

That could explain why they did not have a single PCB board! Are there any reference numbers on the processor board? I could recognize DS16P02A in the video, but there might be other reference numbers on it.

Taiwan versus China
===============

What happened with Taiwanese companies delivering better quality than Chinese companies?

The way it is put together, with missing screws, and plastic posts that are not fixed at the other side.
It seems that they have put this scope together in a similar way like the Eastern European Trabant car

[Fungus]

The race to the bottom continues. How many ultra-low cost entry level scopes does the industry need?

The more the merrier. 

Seriously, how can anybody complain when it brings us things like the DS1054Z?

And...watch the video: There's not much inside it. Why would it cost any more than $400?

PS: You haven't seen the software for thing thing yet. That's what will make or break it, not the hardware. I have a feeling this will be a two-part video...

[Hydrawerk]

What are these plastic cylinders for?? A future expansion module for a DMM?

[EEVblog]

The race to the bottom continues. How many ultra-low cost entry level scopes does the industry need?

As many as the market demands.

GW is only making a few dollars off each after distribution.

How do you know what margin they make?

[lukier]

What are these plastic cylinders for?? A future expansion module for a DMM?

Interesting. It really looks like a DMM expansion. And the slot on the left for the logic analyzer, along with 1.27mm pin headers footprint on the main PCB to connect LA frontend signals.

This Zynq based architecture provides very nice integration of all the oscilloscope functions and the possibility of open source firmware development.

[rx8pilot]

How do you know what margin they make?

I have no idea what margin they make, but when you start with $400 per unit, who cares. I assume they have all the usual manufacturing costs and distribution costs. They still have to sell huge piles of these things every month to be worth much as a business even if they have a 'good margin' whatever that may be.

I am not complaining at all, since it has no effect on me at all. It is more of a business curiosity I have with the 'race to the bottom products' in niche markets. It seems odd to take on the huge costs of designing a new product with all the NRE and setup for manufacturing only to serve such a limited an price sensitive market. At the low-end, there is not much loyalty. The lowest price almost always 'wins'. Seems high risk/low reward.

Just so it is said....I do own a $400 Rigol that was very nice to learn the basics of measurement without much financial risk. As a manufacturer, I always strive for a high-volume low margin OR a low volume high margin. These things seem like an odd target to have a bunch of players.

[wblock]

Those Jamicon caps aren't that bad.  Better than CapXon, as far as I'm concerned.  They don't bother me near as much as that nasty brown glue holding them down in the power supply.  Seen too many boards where that stuff became conductive.

[coppice]

The race to the bottom continues. How many ultra-low cost entry level scopes does the industry need?

As many as the market demands.

The market only demands a couple of really good products (more that one, just to have some competition). Further me toos just divide up the market, and make it harder to recover NRE.

GW is only making a few dollars off each after distribution.

How do you know what margin they make?

I doubt that margin is the key problem for most of these low cost test equipment makers. It will be volume. Get the product right, sell 10s of thousands over the several years life of the product, and your NRE is nicely covered. Sell just a few thousand, and you'll make a loss, even with a fairly good margin.

[jwm_]

Tens of thousands? That seems an order of magnitude low. Over a billion dollars worth of oscilloscopes are sold a year, and these low end models are going to significantly expand the market.

[coppice]

Tens of thousands? That seems an order of magnitude low. Over a billion dollars worth of oscilloscopes are sold a year, and these low end models are going to significantly expand the market.

If you look at historical best sellers, like the Tek 465 or HP 1740, they sold a few thousand per annum (assuming figures quoted on several instrument history sites are realistic). If you look at Chinese sites reporting on the Rigol DS1000Z series, they indicate about 40k units have been sold so far, mostly over the last year. Volumes for 50MHz to 100MHz scopes seem to be considerably higher these days, but the DS1000Z has been the hit product among budget scopes. I doubt most of Rigol's competitors are seeing those volumes. How long will they be able to sustain good volumes, before spending more NRE on the next generation? Famous historic models were made for 10 years or more, but I doubt these current budget models will be. 5 years sounds more like a good lifetime. So, Rigol might ship 200k of the D1000Z. Siglent will probably ship quite a lot of their comparable scopes, too. I assume most other people will ship considerably less, but their NRE will be comparable.

[rsjsouza]

I personally like the overall design of the oscilloscope - despite it may not "look" good, it is certainly much more functional than Rigol's multiplexed functions per button (namely the channel settings).

Despite this, it seems the industrial design forgot that something was needed to draw heat out of the scope - the fan looks like a last-minute hackjob - although some el-cheapo power supplies such as the Korad seem to suffer from the same curse of forced air blowing to a slab.

what would really make this a competition killer:
Toss out the little lcd and the me u buttons around it. Make that whole grey area around the lcd, the new lcd area. And make it a touch screen.
The rubber buttons areound the lcd are gone. If you pull up a menu they slide in, touc to activate.

Touch screens cost next to nothing. Larger lcds are also a dime a dozen.

Leave the roatry encoders and buttons in that area as they are. No need for pop up windows or pinch to zoom. Just a simple zone touch to reclaim the wasted area for the menu buttons around the lcd.

You would not need the pcb area for the buttons, would need the rubber button molding. And it would have an ipad mini sized screen. Something in the 1280x600 resolution...
It would add 10$ tops to the bom...

Free_electron, I think you are bang on with your proposal for Instek to shake Rigol's presence in the entry level, if it wasn't for a significant factor: touch screens cost a lot of software engineering hours to be implemented right. IIRC Dave reviewed an entry-level touchscreen Lecroy that was not very impressive as a gadget (or was it a R&S? Not sure).

Yes! Maybe Jamicon isn't a brand to compare with Nippon Chemi-con, but I was surprised by Dave not having heard of Jamicon or call them "not a name brand".

I was surprised as well. I have several devices with Jamicon caps working continuously for several years (some operating cold, some very hot). Haven't spot a problem yet.

[Fungus]

I personally like the overall design of the oscilloscope - despite it may not "look" good, it is certainly much more functional than Rigol's multiplexed functions per button (namely the channel settings).

The Rigol has lots of weird layout/design choices.

eg. The trigger section 'mode' button and LEDs above it are completely redundant. I always use the big chunky "Run/Stop" and "Single" buttons at the top. They also light up to tell you the current state.

I'd much rather have a proper 'select' button instead of pushing the multifunction knob to select things.

There's quite a bit of weirdness there. A decent UI designer could improve it a lot.

[rsjsouza]

eg. The trigger section 'mode' button and LEDs above it are completely redundant. I always use the big chunky "Run/Stop" and "Single" buttons at the top. They also light up to tell you the current state.

Funny you mentioned that. In my DS4014 I frequently push the "mode" button instead of the "menu" to adjust triggering, as it is prominently placed above the trigger level rotary button. I find myself frequently cursing at the damn button.

I'd much rather have a proper 'select' button instead of pushing the multifunction knob to select things.

I think your point of view is perfectly valid for menu navigation, but it forcefully requires additional space in the front panel - thus it is a portability trade off (you wouldn't want to cram a button in exiguous spaces).

There is a thread where someone replaced the encoders with some from ALPS that required a bit more force to rotate, therefore the issue would be minimized if the right part for the job was chosen. However, others don't seem to care too much - all in all, it may be a matter of opinion.

[Fungus]

I'd much rather have a proper 'select' button instead of pushing the multifunction knob to select things.

I think your point of view is perfectly valid for menu navigation, but it forcefully requires additional space in the front panel - thus it is a portability trade off (you wouldn't want to cram a button in exiguous spaces).

Even better: Accept the menu selection using the same button you used to open the menu, ie. Push a menu button, turn knob to select, push the same menu button again. That's much more intuitive than pressing the knob.

There's no reason why they can't do both push menu button or knob.

While we're at it: It also makes sense to select an item inside the menu using the blue up/down buttons, ie. Push menu button to open the menu, use blue up/down buttons to highlight an item, push menu button again to select it.

The multi-function knob then becomes mostly a brightness/persistence control (which is a good thing!)

Who decided that turning a knob was the correct way to make menu selections anyway? 

There is a thread where someone replaced the encoders with some from ALPS that required a bit more force to rotate.

Are you listening, Rigol...?

[jolshefsky]

I was really puzzled by the front-end differences between channels. I thought the distribution of op-amps was very odd but during the video I noticed something even weirder, I guess: there are two resistors that are only on Channel 4, and they're positioned right by the BNC. In the high-res pictures, they're not populated, but still, why?

[mikeselectricstuff]

I suspect it's not so much differences between channels, but parts randomly distributed around unused space in each channel section.

[rsjsouza]

I suspect it's not so much differences between channels, but parts randomly distributed around unused space in each channel section.

Hehehe... That would potentially do wonders for interchannel crosstalk...

[pascal_sweden]

Parts numbering scheme in the Channel sections: If you look closely to the part numbers, you can see that Channel 3 parts are in the 300 range, while Channel 4 parts are in the 400 range. In fact you can clearly see a 1:1 relationship in the numbers, where part 3xy in the Channel 3 section would exactly correspond to part 4xy in the Channel 4 section.

Possible anomaly in the BOM structure: Given this overall logic structure on all of the parts, it does not make sense that there are 2 extra resistors in the Channel 4 section, and it could actually mean an anomaly in the BOM structure.

Drop-in for Channel BOM instances: All channels are 100% drop-in duplicates where parts in Channel 1 are in the 100 range, parts in Channel 2 are in the 200 range, parts in Channel 3 are in the 300 range, and parts in Channel 4 are in the 400 range, and where 1xyz == 2xyx == 3xyz == 4xy, both part type, part value and part location.

Conclusion: I don't think that this is a random distribution at all, but an actual anomaly.

Is there anybody on this forum who has close contact with GW-Instek product management?
It would be good to address this concern to them directly, and see what their feedback is on this matter.

[tszaboo]

Just going by back-of-the-envelope product pricing:

The scope is $350, i.e. about $140-175 BOM through typical retailers
The ZYNQ is $60, the hittite ADC is $50 (both octopart 1ku pricing)

How do they get the rest of the BOM, including mechanicals, down to $50? That's insane!

Its insane to think that serious buyers of the ZYNQ and Hittite ADC pay those prices when they negotiate for the supply of thousands per annum.

Once I did an quick analysis of that.
Nvidia was selling a board for 120 dollars, which had a 5AGXMA3D4F27C5N on it (gotta love the random number generated naming), which cost 530 dollars each at digikey @ 3EA.
So forget those prices, they can ask any arbitrary number for it. Kinda like the naming.

What surprises me, is the processor board. I could bet money on it they developed in house a breakout board, and that went into the final production. Look a the unfitted GPIO headers. Also GPIO on the top side? Why, to have the heatsink cause trouble?
Also all the PCB lack any company logo or anything art... Really, silkscreen doesnt cost money.

[wblock]

This scope is really interesting, but two things are worrying.

First is the brown glue.  I just worked on a nice Instek programmable power supply, and it had brown glue on the larger electrolytics which had already started to darken from heat.  Fortunately, it was not touching any conductors.  On the scope power supply, that nasty stuff is all over diode and other leads.  I have seen too many burn marks on brown glue to like that.  It probably won't have a problem during the three-year warranty, but sooner or later, it darkens, becomes conductive, and shorts.

The second issue is firmware updates.  The vendors need to be turning out that firmware, mostly to fix problems like the display artifacts.  But the Instek web site still has the same version 1.09 from July.

[Muxr]

It really seems like a bargain competitor to Rigol's successful DS1k. I do wonder though, how much more would it have cost to bump that front end to 100mhz. Purely from the marketing perspective it would have been a slam dunk. One of the most appealing thing for the Rigol is the ease at which you can unlock 100Mhz bw option.

[wblock]

There is an update to the firmware on Instek's website, version 1.13 from January 2016 instead of the 1.09 that Dave had from July 2015.  No change log, so no telling what has changed.

[douglasfilm]

Hello all
For those who are interested I purchased a version of this scope and made a youtube unboxing/ first look video.
The link is:

In the end the update rate is why I selected it over the other entry level scopes.
I am new to oscilloscopes as well as youtube video making.  (disclamer as to the quality of the video)

douglasfilm

[wraper]

I just figured out why this scope seem to be larger than it should be and Dave wondered why. It's enclosure is 100% same as GDS-2000E series. The only thing is different is black display bezel but display is much smaller. The only enclosure part needed to be differently manufactured is that bezel, so they can save the costs.

[nctnico]

It also seems the direction of the fan on the GDS-2000E and GDS-1000B is different but it wouldn't surprise me if it turns out Dave's teardown victim is from a very early production (test) run.