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Well, it wasn't so much "vigilance" that I caught him... actually I had given up and was taking my dog Maggie for a walk and saw the truck down the block. So Maggie's walk got postponed for a bit while I yelled at the driver in frustration.
After walkies, I did an "unboxing" which I haven't posted yet. Odd, this one wasn't double-boxed as they usually are, and its serial number is earlier than the one I returned, if I'm interpreting the numbers properly.
Yes, I have the UltraVision software, installed it from the CD that comes with the scope, onto my Windows laptop. I normally use Linux on the main box.
I worked with it a couple of hours last night... applied the unlocking key, scoped some circuits... then went to bed.
This morning was a horror-show. I was scoping a test circuit, using only one channel, zoomed in... and the scope locked up. OK..well, the other one did that once too and I just power-cycled it and it was fine. SO I press the off button, wait a few seconds, press the button again, the scope boots up, displays the live waveform I was looking at before... but does not respond to any buttons or knobs. None. Nada, nichts, gonzo. I cycle power again.... nothing. No response from any buttons or knobs. Panic sets in.... I keep trying over and over, try USB comms, try the UltraScope software, try USB from my Linux, try LAN... nothing. I've bricked the damn thing, and the warranty is gonna be void because it's stuck in hack mode and I can't remove the hack because no comms work. After a couple hours of frantic panic and emails to Chet, I was shooting a video showing what I had discovered, at certain times during boot up pressing or holding some buttons changed its behaviour a little bit, but always after bootup completed, nothing, No response to any buttons or knobs, although display was normal. But toward the end of the video I did something, held the Auto button down and then again held the Trigger Level knob down... and it WORKED! Came up in factory default with Chinese menus but it worked! Fully responsive again. First thing I did was connect with USB and uninstalled the "hack" so it's back to 50 MHz now. And it's working 100 percent. Whew.... that was a close one. I don't understand what happened and I'm not sure how I fixed it, but at least I have the video that shows whatever it was that I did at the end to get it running.
SO all afternoon I've been testing and burning in. The latest thing to report is that I can communicate with the scope and remote-control it using telnet over the LAN from my Linux box! Way easier than using the UltraScope USB from the Windows laptop. No display functions of course at my level, but at least the remote control works great and very easy to use. Plug the scope into your LAN, set up the thing to fetch an IP address from your DHCP router, and then "telnet 192.168.1.105 5555" (port 5555 is the Rigol's port for LAN comms) and you're in! The Programming Guide lists all the available commands that can be used to control the scope remotely, you just enter them in the telnet window and it works!
I'm going to leave it "unhacked" or stock for the time being just in case... I really don't think that the "hack" had anything to do with it freezing up since I haven't been able to find any reports on the internet of similar things happening to users of hacked scopes. After a while I may reapply the hack and keep my fingers crossed.
Running the self-calibrate function seems to have improved the slight jittering it had. At first I thought that it had a problem since the waveforms were slightly noisy and slightly jittery but now I think I've convinced myself that it's fine. Definitely no glitches on any channels!
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Author
Topic: Let's get Slider (aka Mark Vaughan) a nice 4-channel DSO with math functions! (Read 65655 times)
