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| Tektronix MDO3014 failure, MDO3000 series |
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| GridWork:
So 5 years ago I took some hard earned money an plunked it down on a brand spanking new Tektronix MDO3014 scope plus the logic analyzer expansion. Great running scope, did everything I needed it to until this last week. Fast forward to current time, the scope would just keep resetting. Turn it on, it would run for a few minutes, then act like it got a power cycle. First things first, check prime power, yup that's good, stable and nothing else plugged it has issues. Next, I open the unit to check the 12V power supply, check, it's good (even monitored the output with another scope for glitches). I start checking other test points and find that during the reset the lower voltage outputs from the mezzanine board are also dropping out. It is unclear if that's normal during a power cycle, or possibly the cause. I investigate for hot components and can't find anything. There have been no error messages prior to a restart, just bam reset. I contacted Tek tech support, they recommend upgrading the firmware (I was running 1.18 just fine) and sure enough during the firmware update, RESET! So now the scope has a discombobulated front panel microcontroller (read: buttons, knobs and lights don't work anymore). Next step, request a service quote for getting it back up and running. Tektronix wants $2710 plus shipping to repair the scope. 5 years old, 1424 hours on it and it's essentially garbage. >:( Has anyone else had experience repairing the original problem of the random resets? Not really sure where to start looking yet. I think that the main acquisition board is ok, when it ran it had no problems getting a signal, and it was nice and clean. Nothing hot that I could tell. Any help out there? |
| darkstar49:
Gee... I'd kill the one that advised a firmware update on a scope that does reset randomly !!!!!!! |O And 3K is the price for an MDO3014 with 3 years warranty (and fresh cal) at a major broker here in Europe... Tek's proposal is plain unacceptable, because even if you have it repaired, you'll still be left with a scope without warranty whatsoever, excepted on the repair. At this stage, you're correct... if you don't manage to fix it yourself, you're left with a piece of electronics garbage... |
| GridWork:
If I could just get the code back and stable on the front microcontroller, I might be able to troubleshoot what's going on with the rest of the thing. It sure puts the cost of ownership up there. Right now I think it is setting at around $1338 per year. I deliberately went for the Tektronix because I have had many in my professional career that are 20 years old and still functional. Even my TDS210 that was purchased new in 1998 still works. I only did the firmware update because it was running stable for enough time to give me some confidence. The repair cost would have been the same either way. |
| kcbrown:
This sounds like very poor design on the part of Tektronix. It should never be possible to brick an expensive device like this through an incomplete firmware update. It should have a bootstrap algorithm in ROM that performs a checksum verification against the flash and boots from an earlier version of the code that is also in ROM if the checksum fails. The "service manual" for this scope is laughably worthless, not even worthy of its title. |
| darkstar49:
wasn't there a way to have a 'forced update', even if the scope was unresponsive, by putting some file in the root directory, or renaming the update file ?? I can't imagine Tek has to replace h/w because the update went wrong... I'm pretty sure there's a way (although maybe not public) to push an update on a bricked scope... |
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