EEVblog #875 - NI VirtualBench Teardown

[tszaboo]

The marks on the caps is that someone checked the polarity of them before they power it up. It usually means that the big components there were placed manually on the assembly line, and to avoid popcorn capacitor, a second person checks the polarity.

Otherwise... Yes, nice design, and overkill. Which is probably fine. That 500 buck FPGA probably sold fraction of that price anyways, so why bother redesigning it. Power supply designed in house...I would really like to design boards, where I got enough space, enough money and a big team.

[thm_w]

Despite what some have said, the cost looks reasonable considering all the different instruments in one unit.
I really doubt you could buy a DSO, waveform generator, PSU, and the IO stuff as separate devices for the same cash.
Certainly wouldn't get the advantage of a single PC/tablet control panel.

I could see this being useful for space constrained QA benches.

Vbench - 6750

DS4034 - 4500
DP832 - 450
dm3058e - 469
dg1022 - 379
saelea logic pro 16 - 599
Total = 6400

Yes its 16 channel LA, not 34 but its unlikely a student would use that. Maybe you can find another 32 channel somewhere for about the same.
Either way you get a hell of a lot more features from purchasing the individual instruments.

QA bench would make sense, but its quite niche when 350MHz for QA is necessary.