EEVblog 1510 - $699 Rigol 12bit HDO1000 Teardown - WOAH!

HUGE SURPRISE inside the new low end $699 Rigol 12bit low noise HDO1000 oscilloscope!

Support the EEVblog on:

Buy anything through that link and Dave gets a commission at no cost to you.

Donate With Bitcoin & Other Crypto Currencies!
#ElectronicsCreators #Rigol #oscilloscope

[robdavis]

I think Rigol is intentionally making their scopes hackable. Best marketing ploy ever. They must have sold thousands (extra) of the DS1000 series because people know they can hack them to improve their performance. Same goes for the 2000 series and probably others. If they wanted to they could surely "fix" the hacking issue, but that would hurt sales!!

[jimbrooks]

In the day I worked a 1200 line per minute printer. The company also made a lower cost 600 lpm printer. The difference was a acknowledged signal sent by the printer. It limited max print speed. The price difference was substantial. This is very similar.

[BrianHG.Ocean.Fitness]

@12:25, there is a big movement and some component layout changes in all of the front-ends passive SMD parts, to the top right of the IC. Actually on closer inspection @9:10, it looks like there might have been drop in quality of the layout when trying to maintain high frequency performance. Maybe the HDO1000 was designed first and some improvement was needed for the HDO4000. Except for the minor larger layout, they are so close that a hack for higher bandwidth would still function.
Also @9:10, to the right of the bottom relay, the largest resistor shown, the HDO4000 uses a 2202r resistor while the HDO1000 uses a 2501r resistor.

[westfw]

I wonder if they ship "early" units with fewer changes, but have the potential of using lower-cost versions at a later date?
Like "we wanted to use a cheaper FPGA and front end, but they weren't quite done by the time that marketing demanded we ship." Or "supply chain problems, to be fixed later."

[mytech]

That price:performance ratio even without hacking is making me consider the purchase and I'm just an occational hobby user

[WizardTim]

Very interesting case of crippling for market segmentation, wonder if it would be worthwhile for anyone to salvage/smuggle the ADC ICs to put on those PCBs, but can guarantee there will be software hacks to enable 50 ohms and frequency filters. The hackability of the DS1000Z series was seriously what made it so attractive for many, I almost wonder if this was intentional because of course only hobbyists are going to hack their scopes, large companies are still going to just pay for the correct version and have it calibrated yearly etc.

Would expect hardware configuration and revision data to be stored in some memory those days rather resistors or config file in the eMMC, likely candidate is that C64TA SOIC above the SoC, seems to be some FRAM device, probably also stores serial, calibration data, power on time and relay cycles, might be worth a follow up to see if you can read the data off it with your TL866? Hopefully it has some "unlock_all_features=0" entry XD.

Did notice bottom right on the HDO1000 front end there's a resistor marked "2501" while on the HDO4000 it's "2202". Everything else looks identical.

Also for those thinking it's a different substrate it's purely just a blue colour cast in the still image, in the previous video it's the same colour plus the 94V-0 compliance markings are shared across the two PCBs.

[tony]

Particularly now it must be difficult to acquire components so keeping all the same might be a better choice than trying to source different components and then having to pay a premium to source them when they become unavailable. Tough times. Cool video, thanks!

[andydelle]

This is nothing new especially in lower volume commercial gear. In 1982 Ampex introduced the ADO which could take a NTSC video signal and twist it around and do things with perspective in real time. It cost $250k (American) and the mainframe was about 14 rack units and drew 3kw of AC power. It was chock of those ultra expansive TRW multiplier chips and mostly TTL with some ECL. The main +5v power supply was 200amps! Then around 1985 they came out with two more versions, the ADO 2000 and 1000. The first production units were now re-named the ADO 3000. Obviously the 2000 and 1000 models lacked features but were an attempt to sell into the smaller market TV stations who could not justify a full 3000 model. As we owned nine of the full 3000 units where I worked and were the beta test site, we were loaned a 2000 model to get our input and thoughts on it's reduced feature set. Well us engineers quickly noticed the hardware was identical. So we pulled the PROM set (a bank of 32, 2732 EPROMS, again this was a 1982 design) from a 3000 unit and replaced the PROM set in the 2000. Well it came up as a full 3000 with all features enabled! Anybody with a hobbyist PROM programmer, very common in that day, could duplicate the PROMS. Ampex sales and upper management had a cow and sent the 2000 back to their engineering group to fix that loop hole! Actually they were very thankful to us for finding that "bug". As for the ADO 1000, it was missing several boards that provided image perspective functions and could not be simply upgraded.

[organiccold]

Good job RIGOL, the basic version has the same quality as the higher version even the FPGA! This is very hackable :) They for sure are building them at an amazing cost
As you say Dave: Winner winner, 🐔 dinner!!

[asidesigner]

The ARTIX FPGA is way cheaper than you think Dave, it's almost 10X lower price than digikey. I have bought FPGAs for more than 10 years from china and the price is almost 10X lower than Digikey in single QTY.

[brantwedel]

Based on the price difference for mostly the same hardware, I wonder if they are binning during manufacturing 🤔

[dbcooper]

They might not make money on the base model, just foot in the door and bait for bigger, brand loyalty. It makes good sense to have same layout and same processing to save all cost on software and if the chips aren't critically expensive it's just easier to reuse it. Even if you use different ADs the board and software could be virtually identical.
Also a few parts jumping in the frontends. How much does the AD cost?

[theIpatix]

Torx screws ain't rubbish. They are a lot less prone to wearing out and require less force! (except there are those annoying Torx screws with the pin in the middle).

[johnathanasiou]

When one sits down & thinks about it further, I believe Rigol is possibly playing 4D level chess in the scope market here.

I'm sure there are far more non-obvious differences to hamper the lower cost model but I feel their approach with the HDO1000 is to possibly go for volume sales across a wider customer base spread & sure, the extra BOM cost might add up but so do their sales wins.
The other logical reason is likely due to supply chain issues that ADCs & the extra chip/component supply lines are hampered due to the global supply line situation so Rigol had to adapt.
Furthermore, FPGAs are getting much cheaper & the real cost is in programming development, or maybe Rigol are toying with ideas for new scopes & wants to test the market waters.
Long ago, an ETI magazine designer stated "If you can't hide it, make it a feature".
That Rigol scopes coincidentally seem to be a hackers dream isn't lost on their sales/marketing & engineering/design teams as the HDO1000 & the MSO5000 scopes attract not just the lower end of the market ie hobbyist & cash strapped techs but I feel it's a killer move over their competitors ie Sglent, Hantek, Uni-T, Tektronix etc by also enticing those who love hacking things & have enticed buyers to get a foot in the door to explore more Rigol products ie Spectrum analysers, PSUs etc building their goodwill even further.
The growth in hacking & channels like "Linus Tech Tips", "Hak5" & all the defcon conference interest is definitely not being ignored by manufacturers who are likely thinking of new ways to market their products & gain a competitive edge, especially as global economies falter & people's budgets tighten.
This is in direct contrast to companies like Apple, John Deere etc who seem to enjoy locking everything down & maybe new tech breed companies like Rigol have detected the anti-lockdown sentiment & are developing products to exploit the opportunity.

Rigol knew they made an absolute killing on their DSO1000 series scopes & sure, re-using the PCB design knowledge so will entice even more buyers to the Rigol product range.
Lest we forget that Rigol with their DSO1000 series scopes literally threw a cat amongst the pigeons & has changed the way we all view scopes & I see many of their design decisions have filtered through to other manufacturers.
Hampering cheaper products by manufacturers is nothing new as I've seen TVs, printers, minicomputers, industrial electronics boards, consumer electronics boards which have taken similar approaches.
Having said that, Rigol are making no product guarantees as to any performance specs to further refine the design in later models & I wouldn't be surprised to see later versions with cheaper FPGAs & ADCs, redesigned PCBs in line with the declared specs per product.

My own dilemma now is whether to invest in a Rigol MSO5000 or a HDO1000 4 channel scope.
I applaud Rigol for giving hobbyists, hackers, techs & engineers some real cost effective choices in the scope market

[randalljones]

@9:15 There is more via-stitching on the right side image (the 4000) indicating either we've got different channels displayed (not likely, Dave's too on-top-of-it for that) OR they are doing more work to isolate adjacent channels to reduce cross talk and give better strip-line/micro-strip performance... in other words, they might be demi-crippling the 1000 by altering the controlled impedance nature of the pcb and making the 1000 a bit 'noisier' as you approach/exceed the rated bandwidth. Maybe, possibly? Those traces in the 'flowed area between the relay and the 50 ohm device "appear" to be wider on the 1000 than the 4000 (by maybe 20%?) .. that could increase the distributed capacitance per unit length a bit.
I mean, vias are cheap. It's a trivial change in the Gerber files (or whatever the kids are using these days). No additional parts.
It might be fun to try to measure the width of the traces in the pre-A/D section... another way to alter the performance without altering the BOM.

Hey what do I know? ... I've been out of the biz for (gasp!!) for a while.
It's been nearly 3 decades since I left Mentor Graphics PCB Highspeed Design Tools Group.

[skeggjoldgunnr]

I like my Tektronix 465B with DM44 and CMC251 frequency counter, HP8566B spectrum analyzer, Keithley 2001 w/ scan card and 4-wire kelvin probes, Rohde & Schwarz HMP2020 programmable power supply, Siglent SDG1032x awg, Simpson 260 series 8PRT, HP-410B VTVM, HP 4284A LCR Meter, Fluke 79 series II industrial electrical DMM that's been to absolute hell and back thousands of trips for 30 years and STILL works a champ...and my old black bakelite pressure style spring pressure style Amprobe. Got a couple of them big rack mount HP Harrison linear power supplies built in the 1960's...YES they still put out clean power with plenty of OOmPFH. LOVE me some new toys once in a while...especially when they promise hackey shenanigans. I would set it on my intern's bench as a gift I think...make HIM hack it. Then - sitting by all my ancient equipment that was built RIGHT...mock him with "You kids, n yer MUSIC!...with yer roller skates n yer hopscotch...yer 23 skiddoo! That's always fun.

[flymypg]

It's gotta be the dye in the plastic. What other differences could there be? Maybe the screen?

[melgross]

I know it’s a small thing for most people, but as of around 10 years ago, removing that “do not remove” sticker no longer voids the warrantee.

[schrnz]

This is called "sweating the product/asset" ... they already had a design, they halved the sample-rate and banged another device out to get additional dollars for no additional research, they won't care too much if people hack the 'upgraded' version of the oscilloscope, they've made their margin anyway. When people talking about 'margin' they need to remember, that a lot of the margin in a product goes to 'Labour', in this case, there wouldn't have been much additional labour involved, they're banging out basically the same product and it's probably already mostly automated... having a different product or a product that varies significantly would actually cost more, it would have been hours of intensive design work, and then testing etc etc.

[sclawer]

at 9:18 it is showing 2 missing resistors above the chip. Might that be the difference?