Download Uni-t Oscilloscope Hack
Changing this 50MHz Rigol oscilloscope into its larger, more expensive brother. When it required pulling some capacitors off of the board. Now all it takes is three commands over a serial terminal connection. Take a look at the walk through video after the break.
Nov 12, 2015 Hantek - Tekway - DSO hack - get 200MHz bw for free - Page 1. - UNI-T (UT2102CE) - Rigol. Download the tool.
You’ll see that there’s one chip that needs to be setup differently to change the functionality. Removing capacitors was actually changing the commands sent to initialize that chip at power-up.
Now you can just change the model number and one letter of the serial number via a terminal and the firmware will recognize this as the more expensive DS1102E. Thanks Nullkraft Posted in, Tagged, Post navigation. This is a very common practice. When possible companies design boards that can be used to build different models so they get heavy discounts by ordering great quantities of the same components and/or by resorting to as few production lines as they can.
Uni-t Oscilloscope 60mh 4chanal
Sometimes they just don’t add the components of the bigger models so you see empty spaces on the board (just open your PC/mediacenter/cellphone/router/whatever), sometimes two models are totally identical save for a firmware setting and you get something like this scope. If you ask any suit about this practice he or she will answer that selling the 100 MHz capable model at a higher price is what allows them to sell the 50 MHz model at a lower one, which is both technically true and a smoking pile of bullshit (companies caring for the customers? It’s all about profit and nothing else. There are limits to this of course. A 500 MHz oscilloscope would use so expensive parts and designs that making a 50 MHz model out of it would be unprofitable, so expect to see this only in very similar models. @charper, The exact method and reasoning behind both methods are detailed in the posted video.
As usual HaD has misinterpreted the situation slightly, but not by a whole lot. The capacitors were part of a circuit that controlled which operating mode the scope would run in. It was found you could either manually force the mode by changing this control circuit, or simply change the model number in which case the firmware would change mode on it’s own.
They both do the same thing. @PHm, That seems very likely.
I work for a company and sometimes we do the same: enable and disable features by software, but it is not because they didn’t perform well on testing, it is because R&D and logistic expenses are lower designing one product only, also depends on some target markets, etc. Probably Rigol wants a product on the 20 to 50 MHz range, if they have nothing on this market they can loose sales here. Only they know the true, people that have made the modification have run some testing and the units does not perform bad on higher frequencies. I was waiting until the first guys made the mod and test the changes to change mine. In my experience with higher priced scopes (Agilent, Tek) its very common to have pure software locks on features that are sometimes more expensive than the scope itself. Agilent uses a license key system to unlock FFT, MSO and protocol packages while TEk uses smartcard dongles to unlock similar features.
What I find so amusing, is all of the comments about reliability and how this will affect the perfect calibration of this scope. NO ONE, has mentioned that RIGOL is cheap chinese knock off company just like UNI-T and that these scopes are 1/10 the cost of comparable Agilent or TEk scopes. Now to be clear, I don’t think this hack is a bad idea, just that if your worried about having a rock solid accurate/reliable scope maybe you shouldn’t have bought a chinese knock off to begin with?
Perhaps it’s been done, and I haven’t seen it yet. Until any individual modded Rigor 50MHz scope is properly lab tested and found to meet the all specifications of the Rigor 100 MHz scope, it can’t be said that thatindividual modded scope performs as well as the 100 MHz model. I’m skeptical in that all the remaining components of the 2 models are%100 interchangeable between them. Until I read evidence that most all the modded inexpensive scopes meet all the performance specs of the more expensive scope, this is all a fantasy. In they event that isn’t the case Rigor really isn’t gouging anyone are they?
Shops or manufacturers aren’t going to pay for more scope than they need.