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Yearly Archives: 2009
EEVblog – The Electrical Engineering Video Blog Podcast
David L. Jones, maker of, among many other things, the awesome uWatch, is producing a really cool Electrical Engineering-themed video blog/podcast called ‘EEVblog‘. I don’t why it took me this long to realize what an informative and hilarious video podcast this is, but a couple recent episodes really sucked me in. I am now a huge fan.
David’s blog actually sprang to life in April of this year, so if you want to watch all of the episodes you have some catching up to do. However, some of the most hilarious episodes are also the most recent. For example, here is David’s very honest review of the Microchip PICkit 3, a development tool for Microchip PIC microcontrollers:
And here is Microchip’s equally hilarious response:
David’s blog has covered a lot of other cool topics, such as exploding capacitors, equipment teardowns, and microcontroller datasheets. Check EEVblog out!
Agilent firmware update confirms Rigol connection
Last week, Agilent released a firmware update for their 1000 series oscilloscopes. The 1000 series, Agilent’s lowest end line, is a family of powerful yet reasonably priced digital storage oscilloscopes that includes my DSO1014A.
When I downloaded the firmware update and copied it to a USB stick for transfer to the scope, I noticed that the suffix of the file was .RGL. This reminded me of some rumors I heard a few months back about how Agilent’s low-end scopes are actually manufactured by Rigol Technologies. Rigol makes some very interesting low cost scopes, including the DS1052E, which was reviewed favorably on EEVblog earlier this year.
I opened the .RGL file in a hex editor, and found this:
The highlighted string, “Rigol Technologies“, confirms the Rigol connection.
Later in the same file, Rigol shows up again:
Clearly Rigol is involved with (and probably wrote) the firmware for Agilent scopes.
Interesting also is that the string “DS1204B” shows up in the file. The DS1204B is a 200MHz Rigol model that looks pretty similar to my scope, and the screenshots are a perfect match too.
I’m not implying that this is a bad thing, just interesting. If Agilent needs to outsource the design and/or manufacturing of their low end scopes in order to provide an inexpensive entry-level scope with the Agilent badge on it, so be it. What I haven’t done is actually opened the scope to see if Rigol’s name appears on the hardware as well. Has anyone voided their warranty to investigate?
One more note, I found the DS1204B for $1895, over $500 less than the retail price of the corresponding Agilent DSO1024A. This might make the Rigol an attractive alternative if having the Agilent name on your equipment isn’t important to you. Note that I have not made any effort to go through all the specs for each scope and look for differences. I wouldn’t be surprised if Agilent added their secret sauce to the DSO1000’s to tweak the performance. It would certainly be interesting to see a side by side comparison of both scopes.
Spooky LED circuit
Cool carved pumpkins courtesy of the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering blog. (my alma mater!)
Minor updates to the AVR HV Rescue Shield
This week there have been a couple minor updates to the AVR HV Rescue Shield:
- I just uploaded version 1.1 of the Arduino sketch, which fixes an issue with garbage being printed in the serial monitor between burn cycles. I also made some minor changes to try to reduce the likelihood of getting serial gibberish upon opening the monitor window, although I’m not 100% sure what is causing this. The sketch was compiled and tested with Arduino 0017.
- I have verified that the shield works with the Atmel ATmega328P AVR microcontroller.