| General > General Technical Chat |
| The Rigol DS1052E |
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| Mark_O:
Dave, > plenty of people have had success with the serial port < They seem to have had. Though I'd really like to hear more from Drieg on the corruption he experienced. It could be quite subtle. Or he could just have been using a unit from a different hardware batch. > ...with only a few failures it seems, and they probably didn't follow the instructions. < The folks reporting significant problems most certainly went beyond the boundaries. > If you follow my instructions you shouldn't corrupt your firmware. < We hope. It's possible there could be a single corrupted byte, and it may not matter. E.g., byte alignment for word data may have the critical information starting one byte later than the string termination. - Mark |
| Mark_O:
Simon commented: > I can't see what the hype is about over calibration etc < That's very true. You can't see it. ??? However, that does not stop it from being a potential problem, in spite of that. > the 1052 and the 1102 are the SAME machine and work in the same way... < Irrelevant. > of course if data that is required for calibration is overwritten then well it's an issue < Bingo. > but frankly if changing the model in the same way as rigol clearly do it can have such adverse effects... < The point being precisely that Rigol does NOT change the Model "in the same way". They do it over USB. Just because the RS232 and USB commands operate in the same way most of the time, doesn't mean they do in all cases. These are "special" commands, and I might point out again, in case anyone has forgotten, also undocumented. - Mark |
| EEVblog:
Sure, this needs some investigation and further monitoring, and if it turns out to be a serious problem then it needs to be addressed, and I'll be happy to alert people once facts are known. But until then it's all just speculation really. What can I say, my unit appears to work just fine on every range and function I have tried it on. It's an undocumented hack, so as always, mod at your own risk. I think it's not very feasible that there is a technical difference between using USB or serial. And nobody knows how Rigol do it at the factory, but the command exists, so I'd be surprised if that's not how they do it. But they probably have an automated script. Dave. |
| Mark_O:
Dave commented: > I think it's not very feasible that there is a technical difference between using USB or serial. < Of course there is. Higher-level software can make them look similar, but USB doesn't handle variable-length strings, with terminators. It handles blocks of data, with size info in the header or descriptor. With serial, you're looking at an endless stream of bytes. Byte come in and are processed one at a time. Things like control characters (e.g., BS) that you'd think would be handled by a command parser, aren't. They're just another character. CR's don't work. They're not a line-terminator, as you'd expect. It's not until you hit the specific terminator character it is looking for (LF, ^J, or Alt-010) that it then attempts to process the command you've typed. > my unit appears to work just fine on every range and function I have tried it on. It's an undocumented hack, so as always, mod at your own risk. < Yes, and as you pointed out, it seems to have worked well for many others too. So hopefully, you (and they) are all in the clear. There's a good chance that is the case, and there's "No worries, mate". But until we get more information from Drieg, that apparent success itself is, as you say "just speculation really". And for those who blindly (as in, didn't understand the ramifications) typed in strings that were too long (NOT the people who followed your video, to the letter)... they're in a pickle. This is a really easy mistake to make, since all our experience typing commands into things tells us that we can do things like back up and fix mistakes. And hit Enter when we're done. And that if we type in something that's too long, the software will just chop off the excess for us. But none of that applies on the Rigol. :( Which is where the problems are coming from. This is a sharp-edged sword... without a proper grip. - Mark |
| rossmoffett:
I don't see that all of this bold print and borderline ridicule are merited... We're just discussing oscilloscope modification here, after all. Keeping the conversation civil would be helpful to everyone. With the problems people are experiencing using serial modifications, I also suggest that people try to use the USB protocol (who knows whether this is what Rigol does at the factory, until they say so I don't think anyone can guess). I had intended to do it this way myself, but because I have only two weeks left of university things are really hectic and I just threw together a three-pin serial cable to do my modification. All sorts of things can go wrong when using serial com, as has been mentioned thoroughly, but I don't see how Dave can be held liable for this. Would you say the same to user mxmxmx? To me, for posting my hardware mod? After all, my mod was corrected by user JimBeam later (and I'm happy for it, I didn't know better). This is how things get done by groups on the internet, post everything, if it doesn't work, it'll come out eventually. It's unfortunate that some units have been made unusable, but everyone should know they take their own risks when performing "hacks" to their equipment. It's just the way it is, regardless of how it's portrayed. Right now the success rate seems awesome, more users than are posting have probably done this successfully, as I'm sure any unsuccessful users would post for help. |
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