Rigol DHO800/900 Oscilloscope Bug Reports + Firmware

[Fungus]

My understanding, in line with what I saw in a quick test with the DHO1074 when I had it: When you stop the acquisition, you see a "stable" signal -- stable in the sense that it is no longer flickering and changing (of course). But you will not catch it in the same, stable phase every time you press STOP; it will be essentially a random point in time.

Indeed. just some random frame. But clear.

OK, that's a different thing altogether. The signal is free running (AUTO trigger) and you can stop it but it's not aligned to a video frame when you do.

FWIW I dug out an old TV video game thing and tried it. It doesn't trigger at all on the Rigol.

I tried my Micsig and it triggers perfectly. It even has +/- buttons on the line selector so you can zoom in and single-step through the lines.

(the trigger level marker also disappears from screen on the Micsig when you choose that mode)

[ebastler]

Thanks for the confirmation. Video triggering does work fine on the DS1054Z (and presumably on many other older Rigol models). So they know how to do it and just messed something up in the DHO series -- which can hopefully be fixed soon.

[Aleksandr]

Rigol engineers should be warned about this!

[shapirus]

They really want the bug reports, he said.

Did you suggest him to go read this thread on the eevblog forum? :)

[iMo]

They really want the bug reports, he said.

Did you suggest him to go read this thread on the eevblog forum?

Hopefully the US market will be pushing them to fix fast and often..

[Randy222]

Hopefully the US market will be pushing them to fix fast and often..

That's been said since Rigol started delivering product to US market.
Low-end product will get little attention.
Their units that cost $4000+, probably get more attention.
And Rigol is not alone, it's a common practice.

[ebastler]

Low-end product will get little attention.
Their units that cost $4000+, probably get more attention.

I would not be that pessimistic. Low-end products selling in large numbers have received firmware updates with decent frequency -- look at the DS1000Z series. It seems likely that the DHO800/900 series is taking over as Rigol's top-selling entry level model, hence it will probably get some attention. I would be more concerned about products which sit in "no man's land" in the middle, like the DHO1000.

Having said that, the same software developers who are in charge of the DHO series have probably been busy cranking out those Android-based DMMs, waveform generators and power supplies (do we have those yet?) during the past half-year.  Hopefully they will turn more attention back to the scopes now... 

[Fungus]

That's been said since Rigol started delivering product to US market.
Low-end product will get little attention.
Their units that cost $4000+, probably get more attention.
And Rigol is not alone, it's a common practice.

The DHO4000 series costs that much and the firmware is identical to the DHO800.

(well, 90+ percent identical...)

What bugs me is that most of these fixes would take a morning to correct. Developing this firmware must have taken many man-years years but they can't take two weeks to go through a list of fixes that will be a half a dozen lines of code each?

[Fungus]

I would not be that pessimistic. Low-end products selling in large numbers have received firmware updates with decent frequency -- look at the DS1000Z series.

I remember they moved mountains when the clock jitter bug was found and reported on EEVBLOG.

Maybe @Dave could gather a list of DHO800 bugs and do a video mentioning them all. 

[ebastler]

I remember they moved mountains when the clock jitter bug was found and reported on EEVBLOG.

Indeed! That impressed and reassured me so much that I bought a DS1054Z as soon as the jitter was fixed.

(A purchase I certainly have not regretted. I was less impressed with the lack of polish the DHO1000 got during its more than one year on the market. Well, maybe Siglent's upcoming release of directly competing products will give Rigol some encuragement to do more...)

[shapirus]

Maybe @Dave could gather a list of DHO800 bugs and do a video mentioning them all. 

This may actually turn out to be very effective!
@EEVblog, there is some work that you can do for the benefit of the community

...grr can't figure out how the mention tag works.

[Randy222]

Low-end product will get little attention.
Their units that cost $4000+, probably get more attention.

I would not be that pessimistic. Low-end products selling in large numbers have received firmware updates with decent frequency -- look at the DS1000Z series. It seems likely that the DHO800/900 series is taking over as Rigol's top-selling entry level model, hence it will probably get some attention. I would be more concerned about products which sit in "no man's land" in the middle, like the DHO1000.

Having said that, the same software developers who are in charge of the DHO series have probably been busy cranking out those Android-based DMMs, waveform generators and power supplies (do we have those yet?) during the past half-year.  Hopefully they will turn more attention back to the scopes now...

I would not give too much weight to "frequency" of FW releases.
For 800/900, not that many releases, and, some of us (many of us) keep wondering why each relase notes says "fixing calibration routine". And then other long running bugs go unfixed.
I think we should look at the effectiveness of a new FW release.

Android based is ok, but I am no fan of doing all the coding in Android/java/dalvik/smali. I suspect there's fair amount of math routines in feature-rich scopes, so using "C" to code would be the better choice.

[Fungus]

Android based is ok, but I am no fan of doing all the coding in Android/java/dalvik/smali. I suspect there's fair amount of math routines in feature-rich scopes, so using "C" to code would be the better choice.

All the "oscilloscope" functions are in a big .so file, written in C++.

[axantas]

I remember they moved mountains when the clock jitter bug was found and reported on EEVBLOG.

Indeed! That impressed and reassured me so much that I bought a DS1054Z as soon as the jitter was fixed.

(A purchase I certainly have not regretted. I was less impressed with the lack of polish the DHO1000 got during its more than one year on the market. Well, maybe Siglent's upcoming release of directly competing products will give Rigol some encuragement to do more...)

So, it is not the usual case "do not write about it here, this is just a user forum and the supplier is not reading it". We might be lucky to be hosted by someone reputable as EEVblog.   

[ebastler]

I don't think Rigol follows the forum, or puts much weight to it. It was an EEVblog video on Youtube, highlighting the bug, which got their attention back then.

[Howardlong]

SPI still not working correctly with LA channels in the latest 01.02.00.02 release. Below are the release notes for all of the versions.

Agreed. It's so broken it's difficult to know where to start, but I'll have a stab at it.

When you select a digital channel for CS, it still wants a Threshold, but these are defined in the LA, 8 channels at a time. Choosing a digital channel for CLK or MISO greys out the Threshold.

If you set it up on analogue channels first, and get it to work, then try to switch the decoder to digital channels, it still refers to the analogue channels despite what the decoder screen says.

Changing the LA channel size to medium and especially large leaves you with a ton of blank space between the LA channels.

You seem to be able to change the order of the channels on the screen, but they are fixed to very course vertical grid, you can't reduce the blank space between channels other than by selecting small... which is tiny, even for me, and I usually prefer super small text!

Defaulting the LA channels to a zero volt threshold is nonsense on 99.9% of use cases for this scope.

[Randy222]

SPI still not working correctly with LA channels in the latest 01.02.00.02 release. Below are the release notes for all of the versions.

Agreed. It's so broken it's difficult to know where to start, but I'll have a stab at it.

Reply #390.

While the hackers dig in to try to mitigate, just keep track of calendar days until Rigol releases a FW that fixes these issues.

[AceyTech]

Maybe @Dave could gather a list of DHO800 bugs and do a video mentioning them all. 

This may actually turn out to be very effective!
@EEVblog, there is some work that you can do for the benefit of the community

...grr can't figure out how the mention tag works.

The "mention" button in this case is in the lower right corner of the post(actually EVERY post)

"Report to moderator" 

[pakakezu]

I have a somewhat noob question. I started to adapt the ds1054Z python library to get raw data from the scope. Given this is a 12bit scope, for me the logical way to get samples from the full memory is to put :WAV:FORM into WORD mode instead of BYTE because the samples are bigger than 8 bits. However when running ":WAVeform:DATA?" i get operation not supported, only works for BYTE wave format.
What i'm missing if i want to extract the full memory (not only the display) data, in full 12bit resolution?

Code: [Select]

-> :WAVeform:DATA?

<- The instruction is not supported!

-> :WAVeform:FORMat?

<- (Return Count:5)

WORD


[Randy222]

Hey, I forget, did someone have a clock app or something they installed ?

I poking around the auklet.so and found big long list of SCPI commands. What I did not know aboy SCPI command, commands you might find in a PDF and such, the lowercase letters can be truncated.

Example: :DISplay:INTensity is the same as :DIS:INT
I did not know that.
Oddly though, the code has the OR in it, thus bloating the firmware some. Every SCPI command has the extra OR data in the code !

Code: [Select]

(:?DISplay|:?DIS)(:CLOCk|:CLOC)

But if you want the clock (albeit wrong date-time w/o ext ntp sync)
SCPI :DIS:CLOC 1 cammand activates screen clock directly under LXI logo bottom right of screen.

[thm_w]

So, it is not the usual case "do not write about it here, this is just a user forum and the supplier is not reading it". We might be lucky to be hosted by someone reputable as EEVblog.   

No one is saying "do not write about it here". You should absolutely write about and document here. But if no one sends it to Rigol Support there is a 99% chance nothing will be done with that info.

You have to get the ball rolling, send a single email per bug to support with:
- Clear and simple reproduction instructions
- How it affects your company/workflow
- How you were planning to buy 1,000 DHO924's but now you are not sure

Once they verify then they can enter it, somewhere, and hopefully it gets tracked and added to a queue.

[Randy222]

I poking around the auklet.so and found big long list of SCPI commands. What I did not know aboy SCPI command, commands you might find in a PDF and such, the lowercase letters can be truncated.

Congrats! You're up to page 5 of the programming manual!

Seriously tho',  Great job finding that "in the dark". And thanks for the clock hack info.

I suspect the manual per model does not cover all the scpi commands a DHO can do (or not do), after adding options lics, etc. Like the clock item.
Enabling BODE on an optioned 804 (914) does some weird stuff.
I believe one command causes the Scope app to crash.

[Lathe26]

No one is saying "do not write about it here". You should absolutely write about and document here. But if no one sends it to Rigol Support there is a 99% chance nothing will be done with that info.

You have to get the ball rolling, send a single email per bug to support with:
- Clear and simple reproduction instructions
...
Once they verify then they can enter it, somewhere, and hopefully it gets tracked and added to a queue.

Along these lines, I just sent in a detailed bug report regarding the Video Triggering not working (via help@rigol.com).  This included details steps and photos.  Hopefully this helps.

[Aleksandr]

No one is saying "do not write about it here". You should absolutely write about and document here. But if no one sends it to Rigol Support there is a 99% chance nothing will be done with that info.

You have to get the ball rolling, send a single email per bug to support with:
- Clear and simple reproduction instructions
...
Once they verify then they can enter it, somewhere, and hopefully it gets tracked and added to a queue.

Along these lines, I just sent in a detailed bug report regarding the Video Triggering not working (via help@rigol.com).  This included details steps and photos.  Hopefully this helps.

 

[AceyTech]

Along these lines, I just sent in a detailed bug report regarding the Video Triggering not working (via help@rigol.com).  This included details steps and photos.  Hopefully this helps.

Thanks for that.  Did your report include anything about the positive vs negative HSync selectors?





I.e., Positive = Negative and Negative = Positive?
And what kind of device puts out composite video like what is shown in second pic?  I sure would like to see a spec for it.