Turn your Rigol DS1052E Oscilloscope into a 100MHz DS1102E
in [Design]
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From: David L. Jones on 1 Apr 2010 00:01 Glenn Gundlach wrote: > On Mar 31, 11:23 am, John Larkin > <jjlar...(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: > <snip > > > The scopes are not identical because they have different specs and > > firmware. Just like versions of Windows, or GPS units, or all sorts > of > > things have different specs and functions differentiated by > firmware. > > > > Rigol made it too easy to hack their scope, and Jones took > advantage > > of it. I still don't know why. > > > > John > > I pretty much agree with you but has anybody verified that the > hardware is indeed identical? They don't install a faster processor or > A-D or better grade amps? By all accounts, no, the 100MHz unit is an identical board. People who tried to examine the hardware front ends (and other parts) could not find any differences between the two models. That's what originally prompted me to suggest there was just a component value difference in the models, but of course as it turns out it's much simpler than that, they are identical. If they weren't identical, then there would be no need for the software logic switch to set the 50MHz limit, they'd simply do it with BOM changes. The sample rate and all other performance features are the same between units, so there is no need for better or faster ADC's or processor in the 100MHz model. Dave. -- ================================================ Check out my Electronics Engineering Video Blog & Podcast: http://www.eevblog.com
From: Michael A. Terrell on 1 Apr 2010 00:07 John Tserkezis wrote: > > George Jefferson wrote: > > > Your justifications only show that you fit in the same group as Rigol. I > > won't be buying anything from you and I hope your customers will find > > someone else to give their money to. > > Perhaps he doesn't appreciate that Rigol make these things in > *quantity*. Remember, they're overclocking the ADCs, so they're cutting > costs in every way they can. > > His justification would only work on small runs, where it would > worthwhile to have someone MANUALLY plug in a port, test, program > accordingly, and stick the relevant label. > > The only cheap way to do it, is to have a production line test jig, > that automagically programs, probes and accordingly presets the > equipment to the required spec. > All of this would be most economically viable for the numbers Rigol are > handling, and even EASIER to obscure a simple "one character" difference. > > Instead, they have this part of the communications available to the end > user, via an industry standard interface and keyboard-capable commands. > > Mind you, they *could* be doing it as I outlined above. But the fact > remains, if it were so easy to obscure this part from the end user, why > did they almost appear to go out of their way to make it easy instead? > > Whether or not the user re-programming is, or is not allowed, likewise > if it should or should not be allowable, is rather irrelevant now. > > Whatever the reason, they *HAVE* made it easy, and this pretty much > negates any whining IMO. That bolted horse comes to mind. ATE & SATE have been around for decades. -- Lead free solder is Belgium's version of 'Hold my beer and watch this!'
From: Martin Brown on 1 Apr 2010 04:14 John Larkin wrote: > On Wed, 31 Mar 2010 09:47:27 +0100, Martin Brown > <|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote: > >> John Larkin wrote: >>> On Wed, 31 Mar 2010 11:29:12 +1100, "David L. Jones" >>> <altzone(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>>> For those with a Rigol DS1052E oscilloscope, you can now turn it into a >>>> 100MHz DS1102E with just a serial cable: >>>> >>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnhXfVYWYXE >>>> >>>> Dave. >>> What you have done is possibly a criminal act in the USA, using a >>> computer to deprive Rigol of revenue. In the US, "using a computer" to >>> perform an act can be a much more severe crime than the act itself. >> "Land of the Free" criminalises lots of things. The punters must be >> ripped off by corporate excess at every turn - just look at the DMCA as >> an example of how your congress critters are in hock to big business. > > You don't favor copyrights or legal protection for intellectual > property? If you spent years writing a book or a symphony or > developing a product that was mostly firmware, you wouldn't mind if > people copied it and sold cheap knockoffs? I didn't say that at all. I am in favour of protection of genuine novel inventions and copyright on creative works. I am absolutely opposed to the idiotic USPTO granting patents on mathematical identities and blindingly obvious prior art in the software field. Remember I originate mostly software. And that is far more easily copied by the unscrupulous since it is designed to run on a generic computer. These days mostly PCs but I have done stuff in the past that ran on everything from a humble Z80 (with a lot of paging) to a CrayXMP. Strange thing was we learnt a few new tricks with every compiler the code was compiled on. The Z80 compiler was very strict and minimalist. > > There is an argument against copyrights and patents, but it would > change a lot of things. Your DMCA is an insane piece of legislation intended to pander to the rip-off merchants in Hollywood and US music industry. ISTR analogue playback of DVDs in the US is deliberately hobbled to satisfy them. > >> The Sony BMG CD rootkit fiasco in 2005 was a particularly nasty example >> of this with the boot on the other foot. >>> I have some sympathy for Rigol here. Many of our products have an >>> option that can be enabled in firmware, and that we charge for. We put >>> a lot of engineering effort into the firmware, and need to be paid for >>> it. If buyers of my gear can order the cheaper one and make it into >>> the expensive one, by copying an EPROM maybe, or setting a bit in >>> flash somewhere, I can't recover the cost of the feature. The act is >>> arguably legal theft. It's certainly moral theft. >> Even as an originator of IP I find it difficult to have much sympathy >> for Rigol here when they clearly made no effort to cover their tracks in >> the firmware. It would only have taken an MD5 or CRC of the serial >> number XORred with a bit pattern known only to them to prevent hackers. > > Yes. Their mistake was making it too easy. Exactly. Got it in one. > >> If you can upgrade it by sending it a new model number then why not? >> >> They won't easily stop hardware mods though. Engineers tweaking >> commercially available products by swapping out weak components to >> improve or make them more reliable has been going on since the year dot. > > It looks as if hardware-hacking the varicap bandwidth limiter is > legal, but doing it through the serial port may be a crime in the US. More fool the US legislators. The customer must always be ripped off. Are you seriously claiming that you think the DCMA is good legislation? The hardware is clearly capable of 100MHz operation and a trivial command sequence will enable it (or reversibly degrade the bandwidth). Cutting a track and a quick hardware mod would also do the job. I don't see that changing a few bytes in NV ram using undocumented commands is any different to swapping out the front end transistors or whatever other tricks were done on some of the old analogue scopes to soup them up. What about using some of the undocumented hardware features of the profiling instructions on my Intel PCs. No doubt you would say that infringes the DMCA since I don't have Intels blessing. > >>> Products are increasingly IP and less hardware these days, and the IP >>> is expensive. >> Indeed. And that is why you should not make it trivial to hack. > > Agreed. Hackers are amazingly inventive. Serious point here. I don't mind registering and binding the licence key to the MAC address of one PC and/or owners name. That is pretty much what I do. Once it is installed I cannot stop them giving it away, but I can tell if I ever see an illicit copy who gave it away. This is usually sufficient to discourage all but the most untrustworthy characters. Most people are basically honest but require a bit of encouragement. I rather like the game industry copy protection where an illicit cloned game would play OK for 5 or 10 minutes and then have gravity decrease to zero or mutate the laws of physics in some other way. Enough time to get people hooked on the gameplay but still needing to buy a copy. I absolutely hate paranoid invasive security measures like dongles on parallel ports I no longer have that only work on slow machines or require the DVD inserted every 10th use. These generally only inconvenience genuine purchasers without putting up that much resistance to a concerted attack by professional pirates. The Chessmaster series of programs is a good example of this daft insert the CD method and it is protecting something that retails for about �10. If you have ever been in the Far East you will know what I mean about knock-off software being everywhere (and often laden with malware). >>> Of course, Rigol made it too easy. They will probably go back and make >>> it harder to do, and that will make the scope cost more in both >>> versions. >> However, it does make the Rigol DS1052E a very attractive proposition >> for the moment. UK/Oz attitudes to hacking kit are somewhat more relaxed >> than in the US. Almost all DVD players here are available in MultiRegion >> hacked form and even NASA brings its DVD kit to London to be doctored. >> Region locked players do not sell particularly well to UK film buffs. >>> I recently got a 1052E, and it's a pretty nice scope. The digital >>> filtering is not perfect, but it's sure cute. It has way more goodies >>> than a comparable Tek for under half the price. I'll probably get a >>> few more. >> You may as well patch them for 100MHz bandwidth then. Send Rigol the >> price difference or whatever you think it is worth if your conscience >> bothers you. > > I don't intend to hack any of them and I never steal IP. I hope that > people won't hack my products and steal my engineering investment. You never knowingly steal IP. You have no way of telling when the slimy fat lawyers from Patent Carpet Baggers Inc will come knocking and demand that you pay a huge ransom for infringing their US patent on "whatever". > > And 50 MHz is a good place for a bench scope, clear of a lot of FM and > TV crud. The Rigol looks great at 50 MHz, but noisy and ringy at 100. But if you happened to want to use it at 100MHz then enabling that feature would be useful. In the UK 85MHz bandwidth would be OK. Waveforms with sharp rise times always look worse at higher bandwidth. Regards, Martin Brown
From: Martin Brown on 1 Apr 2010 04:16 John Larkin wrote: > On Wed, 31 Mar 2010 09:47:27 +0100, Martin Brown > <|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote: > >> John Larkin wrote: >>> On Wed, 31 Mar 2010 11:29:12 +1100, "David L. Jones" >>> <altzone(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>>> For those with a Rigol DS1052E oscilloscope, you can now turn it into a >>>> 100MHz DS1102E with just a serial cable: >>>> >>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnhXfVYWYXE >>>> >>>> Dave. >>> What you have done is possibly a criminal act in the USA, using a >>> computer to deprive Rigol of revenue. In the US, "using a computer" to >>> perform an act can be a much more severe crime than the act itself. >> "Land of the Free" criminalises lots of things. The punters must be >> ripped off by corporate excess at every turn - just look at the DMCA as >> an example of how your congress critters are in hock to big business. > > You don't favor copyrights or legal protection for intellectual > property? If you spent years writing a book or a symphony or > developing a product that was mostly firmware, you wouldn't mind if > people copied it and sold cheap knockoffs? I didn't say that at all. I am in favour of protection of genuine novel inventions and copyright on creative works. I am absolutely opposed to the idiotic USPTO granting patents on mathematical identities and blindingly obvious prior art in the software field. Remember I originate mostly software. And that is far more easily copied by the unscrupulous since it is designed to run on a generic computer. These days mostly PCs but I have done stuff in the past that ran on everything from a humble Z80 (with a lot of paging) to a CrayXMP. Strange thing was we learnt a few new tricks with every compiler the code was compiled on. The Z80 compiler was very strict and minimalist. > > There is an argument against copyrights and patents, but it would > change a lot of things. Your DMCA is an insane piece of legislation intended to pander to the rip-off merchants in Hollywood and US music industry. ISTR analogue playback of DVDs in the US is deliberately hobbled to satisfy them. > >> The Sony BMG CD rootkit fiasco in 2005 was a particularly nasty example >> of this with the boot on the other foot. >>> I have some sympathy for Rigol here. Many of our products have an >>> option that can be enabled in firmware, and that we charge for. We put >>> a lot of engineering effort into the firmware, and need to be paid for >>> it. If buyers of my gear can order the cheaper one and make it into >>> the expensive one, by copying an EPROM maybe, or setting a bit in >>> flash somewhere, I can't recover the cost of the feature. The act is >>> arguably legal theft. It's certainly moral theft. >> Even as an originator of IP I find it difficult to have much sympathy >> for Rigol here when they clearly made no effort to cover their tracks in >> the firmware. It would only have taken an MD5 or CRC of the serial >> number XORred with a bit pattern known only to them to prevent hackers. > > Yes. Their mistake was making it too easy. Exactly. Got it in one. > >> If you can upgrade it by sending it a new model number then why not? >> >> They won't easily stop hardware mods though. Engineers tweaking >> commercially available products by swapping out weak components to >> improve or make them more reliable has been going on since the year dot. > > It looks as if hardware-hacking the varicap bandwidth limiter is > legal, but doing it through the serial port may be a crime in the US. More fool the US legislators. The customer must always be ripped off. Are you seriously claiming that you think the DCMA is good legislation? The hardware is clearly capable of 100MHz operation and a trivial command sequence will enable it (or reversibly degrade the bandwidth). Cutting a track and a quick hardware mod would also do the job. I don't see that changing a few bytes in NV ram using undocumented commands is any different to swapping out the front end transistors or whatever other tricks were done on some of the old analogue scopes to soup them up. What about using some of the undocumented hardware features of the profiling instructions on my Intel PCs. No doubt you would say that infringes the DMCA since I don't have Intels blessing. > >>> Products are increasingly IP and less hardware these days, and the IP >>> is expensive. >> Indeed. And that is why you should not make it trivial to hack. > > Agreed. Hackers are amazingly inventive. Serious point here. I don't mind registering and binding the licence key to the MAC address of one PC and/or owners name. That is pretty much what I do. Once it is installed I cannot stop them giving it away, but I can tell if I ever see an illicit copy who gave it away. This is usually sufficient to discourage all but the most untrustworthy characters. Most people are basically honest but require a bit of encouragement. I rather like the game industry copy protection where an illicit cloned game would play OK for 5 or 10 minutes and then have gravity decrease to zero or mutate the laws of physics in some other way. Enough time to get people hooked on the gameplay but still needing to buy a copy. I absolutely hate paranoid invasive security measures like dongles on parallel ports I no longer have that only work on slow machines or require the DVD inserted every 10th use. These generally only inconvenience genuine purchasers without putting up that much resistance to a concerted attack by professional pirates. The Chessmaster series of programs is a good example of this daft insert the CD method and it is protecting something that retails for about �10. If you have ever been in the Far East you will know what I mean about knock-off software being everywhere (and often laden with malware). >>> Of course, Rigol made it too easy. They will probably go back and make >>> it harder to do, and that will make the scope cost more in both >>> versions. >> However, it does make the Rigol DS1052E a very attractive proposition >> for the moment. UK/Oz attitudes to hacking kit are somewhat more relaxed >> than in the US. Almost all DVD players here are available in MultiRegion >> hacked form and even NASA brings its DVD kit to London to be doctored. >> Region locked players do not sell particularly well to UK film buffs. >>> I recently got a 1052E, and it's a pretty nice scope. The digital >>> filtering is not perfect, but it's sure cute. It has way more goodies >>> than a comparable Tek for under half the price. I'll probably get a >>> few more. >> You may as well patch them for 100MHz bandwidth then. Send Rigol the >> price difference or whatever you think it is worth if your conscience >> bothers you. > > I don't intend to hack any of them and I never steal IP. I hope that > people won't hack my products and steal my engineering investment. You never knowingly steal IP. You have no way of telling when the slimy fat lawyers from Patent Carpet Baggers Inc will come knocking and demand that you pay a huge ransom for infringing their US patent on "whatever". > > And 50 MHz is a good place for a bench scope, clear of a lot of FM and > TV crud. The Rigol looks great at 50 MHz, but noisy and ringy at 100. But if you happened to want to use it at 100MHz then enabling that feature would be useful. In the UK 85MHz bandwidth would be OK. Waveforms with sharp rise times always look worse at higher bandwidth. Regards, Martin Brown
From: Martin Brown on 1 Apr 2010 04:27
John Larkin wrote: > On Wed, 31 Mar 2010 12:30:53 -0700, Jon Kirwan > <jonk(a)infinitefactors.org> wrote: > >> On Wed, 31 Mar 2010 08:53:03 -0700, John Larkin >> <jjlarkin(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: >> >>> On Wed, 31 Mar 2010 07:14:03 -0700 (PDT), George Herold >>> <ggherold(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>>> On Mar 30, 8:29 pm, "David L. Jones" <altz...(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>>>> For those with a Rigol DS1052E oscilloscope, you can now turn it into a >>>>> 100MHz DS1102E with just a serial cable: >>>>> >>>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnhXfVYWYXE >>>>> >>>>> Dave. >>>>> >>>>> -- >>>>> ================================================ >>>>> Check out my Electronics Engineering Video Blog & Podcast:http://www.eevblog.com >>>> Excellent, I just ordered a Rigol DS1052E! The best news is that >>>> even without the mod the 50 MHz is closer to 70 MHz as is.... (just >>>> scaling your measured 5ns rise/fall time.) >>>> >>>> George H. >>> It has very clean transient response as shipped, at the 50 (or 70) MHz >>> bandwidth. The hacked version is ratty looking. I wouldn't do the hack >>> even if it was morally and legally fine. >>> >>> This is a very nice little scope, superb for the price. It has loads >>> of more features than a comparable Tek at around 1/3 the price. >>> >>> Why Jones would choose to hurt Rigel is a mystery to me. >> It's not Dave's job to protect Rigol. > > He sure didn't protect them. He apparently organized an effort to hack > their scopes and cost them money, and went public with it. > >> Whether he hurt them or not is a question that isn't clear, >> nor answered yet. If Rigol is forced to make further >> modifications because of Dave, and only because of Dave, then >> you may have a point on that narrow ledge. But it still >> doesn't mean Dave has any responsibility to protect them from >> such actions they may later choose to take. >> >> Besides the issue that Dave is acting as an independent, free >> agent and may choose what is in his own better interests, he >> cannot possibly be expected to consult some personal Ouija >> board about the mind of Rigol about their own business >> interests. Rigol can fend for themselves. And they are >> perfectly able to do so. > > Maybe they have lawyers to help them fend for themselves. > >> In any case, I generally prefer a world where knowledge is >> freely shared, education valued, and the consequences lived >> with more than one where knowledge ie metered out. Dave gave >> information, which is fine. You did too when you commented >> about the "clean transient response" and the fact that you >> don't think it is wise to hack it for your own needs. Which >> is good information, as well. Then just let the end user >> decide for themselves what is better for them. As it should >> be. > > Jones still hasn't said why he did it. Because he could. And there is clearly interest in what he reported. It isn't logically that different from reporting on finding undocumented instructions on a CPU. Undocumented useful commands on a piece of kit. In the "Land of the Free" with DMCA I expect that is also a criminal offence. Regards, Martin Brown |