Turn your Rigol DS1052E Oscilloscope into a 100MHz DS1102E

[Swanny]

Rigol did the engineering and selected a business model, and you chose
to break it based on some moral judgement of your own. They will have
to react somehow, which will cost them money one way or another.

Why did you do this? Did you feel that Rigol was cheating the public
and deserved to be exposed and, additionally, deprived of revenue?

John

If I choose to improve something by modifying it after purchasing it
then I will do so. This could be anything from changing caps in a PSU to
replacing op amps in an audio circuit or overclocking a CPU.
If the modification is simply a configuration change in software then
that makes it easier.

 

[fritz]

It may be a felony under DCMA. I'm not a lawyer so I'm not sure.

John

**** the lawyers ! They are the leeches of the world. And although you
ain't one, you seem to aspire to be one by your subservient attitude.
All this crap about 'software licensing' is lawyer talk. If I buy a product
(software or hardware) I own the fucking thing and I can do what I want
with it as long as I don't sell it to anyone else.

Take a step back from your silly posturing and consider the following...
How is anyone going to find out what you have done to your own
'scope in the privacy of your home ? Can you see Rigol getting
search warrants to invade their customer's homes ???

 

[Swanny]

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.

So are all the overclockers in the USA in jail for depriving Intel of
revenue by not buying a higher grade CPU for more $?

 

[David L. Jones]

Oh I don't plan on hacking it. I just figured that there might be a
tick up in sales of the 50MHz version and I should get mine before
they sell out. And yeah the pulse response looked nice. (I also like
that it's a bit faster than the spec.) I'm not sure about the
rattiness of the 100MHz response.. after all the 100MHz TEK pulse
looked ratty too and it might have been that Dave was hitting it with
a raggy pulse to begin with. (Sorry Dave, I don't mean to dis your
bench test skills.)

I think Dave likes Rigol and I'm not sure his hack will hurt sales. I
would guess it's only a small fraction of users that would want the
hack anyway. I would bet.. though I don't know how to prove it.. that
Dave has been good for Rigol sales. (He is certainly responsible for
my purchase of one.)

I know for a fact that my (positive) review and pushing of the Rigol scope
on my blog and other places has directly resulted in at least several
hundred sales (people email me and thank me for it almost daily). My review
of the Rigol has been viewed over 15,000 times, so I'd be surprised if I'm
not responsible for sales in the thousands, directly or indirectly. I'm
probably Rigol's biggest independent public supporter.

BTW, I did not come up with the solution and expose it, it's been public
info on various forums for weeks before I did my video, and was even
featured on Hackaday. And I have just heard that Rigol have already fixed
the firmware before I did the video.

John seems obseesed with "why I did it". Err, in case he missed it, I run an
electronics engineering video blog, and have had several episodes on the
Rigol, so I and many of my viewers are curious about how Rigol (and others)
design and market their products. I originally suggested the possibilty of a
mod out of curiosity, so it's a update on what my viewers have discovered
and have already shared with the world. There is actually nothing new in my
video.
I'm not depriving Rigol of anything, my blog is educational, and once again
I believe I'm helping promote their products. To think my blog would hinder
sales is ridiculous.

But given that Rigol are (or were) the 2nd biggest oscilloscope manufacturer
in the world (they might be #1 now), my little blog is hardly going to
amount to a hill of beans in terms of (I believe positive) sales for them
anyway.

John needs to get off his ridiculous US DCMA hobby horse.

Dave.

 

[fritz]

......

Looking at the transient response at 100 MHz, which kinda sucks, I
wonder if the 50 and 100 MHz scopes are indeed identical except for
firmware.

John

Kinda sucks ?
Did you watch the eevblog ??? I don't think you have the slightest clue
about
what fast signals really look like. The higher the bandwidth the messier
they look as various resonance effects in the measurement circuit
are revealed - use a 1Ghz 'scope and they REALLY suck.
The modded Rigol compared very well with a 100Mhz Tektronix TDS 1012.

 

[fritz]

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?

You sure talk like a US lawyer - mostly irrelevant crap.

Nobody is copying their Rigol DS1052E and selling them.
And nobody is turning 50MHz Rigols into 100MHz Rigols and SELLING THEM.

We are talking about people who have bought Rigol 'scopes legally already.
What they do to the Rigol that they OWN in the privacy of their own workshop
is
not the business of any fucking lawyer (or wannabe lawyer in your case.)
Even the biggest wankers in the world (lawyers in the US) would have trouble
getting a search warrant to check on the NVRAM settings in a DSO.

 

[Jon Kirwan]

On 3/31/2010 12:46 AM, [email protected] wrote:
On Mar 30, 8:03 pm, John Larkin
On Wed, 31 Mar 2010 11:29:12 +1100, "David L. Jones"

For those with a Rigol DS1052E oscilloscope, you can now turn it into a
100MHz DS1102E with just a serial cable:

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.

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.

Products are increasingly IP and less hardware these days, and the IP
is expensive.

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.

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.

John

The design cost is amortized over all the units. [Hey, don't worry
what the consults charges, it will go to zero as we sell a million
units.]

Rigol does themselves a disservice by having to maintain two
products. They should just sell the higher speed scope, bomb the
market, and then own it.


Destroying a market isn't usually a good way to make money in the long
run.

And it's easily possible that Rigol saves a boatload of money by having
only one assembly number to design, code, build, and test. Remember
that (as Dave discovered earlier) they're actually overclocking the ADCs
on the 100 MHz model--so one can argue it's really a 50 MHz scope that
Rigol themselves hacked into a 100 MHz one.

Companies have been selling crippleware forever--the earliest example I
know of was the 6 MHz IBM PC-AT. You changed the crystal and one other
thing that I forget, and suddenly you had a blistering fast 8 MHz AT!
(Cooler than the coolest thing ever, no?) There were similar howls of
outrage over that one.

I did that modification, myself, upon buying an IBM PC/AT
for, if I recall correctly, $5499! It would work up to about
8.5MHz, by the way. I tried 9, but the I/O bus clocked up
with the CPU (at that time) and some of the add-in boards
couldn't keep up. However, 8.5MHz worked across the board,
quite well. I clocked back to 8.0MHz and lived happily ever
after.

Not for one split second did I believe I was doing something
wrong, here. Not for one moment. I still think it was fine
to do.

The Kaypro 286i was the first "truly compatible" IBM PC
machine built after that and it cost almost $2000 less to
buy, new. (There were other attempts, but they failed on a
variety of applications at the time and were crippled in one
way or another until the Kaypro 286i made it out.)

There was a short period (year?) where the ISA (wasn't known
as that, at the time, but I'm referring to the 8/16 bit bus
that came out with the PC/AT) bus had to be separated better
from the CPU clock and thus was born the ability to clock the
CPU up higher (10,12,16MHz) without making bus boards fail.
That led to Chips&Technology developing their IC to save all
those discrete IC parts populating the boards. And that led
to Intel deciding (eventually, years later on) to take over
that market and develop their own chipset. Etc.

But it was morally RIGHT to clock up the system. I still
think so and if John L. is on the other side of this question
then we have a fundamental difference of opinion. However,
he hasn't weighed in on it, so it is hard to know.

The moral question is actually an interesting one, I think, and the
different views seem to hinge on what people think they're buying, and
whether a hardware/software combination is more like hardware (which you
can hack up as you like) or software (which has a license agreement
you're bound by).
<snip>

It is an interesting question and made all the more so
because different people may fall on different sides here.
That's what makes it interesting. If everyone took the same
position, it would indeed be dullsville.

Jon

For hardware, I agree entirely. You bought it, you can hack it up any
way you want. For software, you don't own it, you only license it, and
that restricts what you can do.

This last situation is one that _developed_ in the US due to
a law suit (or several) that took place around the time when
VisiCalc was a "big deal" in and around 1980. Prior to this
time, software was bought and sold and the older US laws
regarding rights followed that legal lagacy. If you BUY the
software, you can loan it to others, etc. What happened is
that some software manufacturers (using the term, loosely)
decided that they didn't want that legal legacy and tried
hard to pony up some "new idea." That new idea was selling
licenses to use, not direct ownership. This really didn't
have a lot of legal history to it and there was a debate as
to whether or not one could "sell" a product over the
counter, on a wide spread basis.

(By this, I mean, sold just like a hammer is and NOT like the
usual 'licence to use' was before, which was strictly done
between two eyes-open parties who represented themselves on a
professional and fully informed basis and wrote a contract
which was duly signed by appropriate authorities. Up to that
time, there were licenses... yes. But they were strictly
done on a written contract basis and done 1-on-1. This was
new in the sense that merely "opening" a package was to be
taken as a fully-informed legal contract. Which is a very
different thing.)

A court (in my opinion, wrongly) decided this issue and
opened the door that we now find ourselves completely on the
other side of.

Hardware is as it always was, though. Software went through
a dimensional door and we are now in another universe.

So far, so well understood.
Yes.

These hardware/software gizmos we're surrounded with are in a bit of a
grey area. If you bought an Apple computer, for instance, you'd own the
hardware but only license the pre-installed software. You don't get a
right to hack/rip off/disassemble their software just because you bought
their hardware.

I don't like the DMCA in general, and I think it was silly of Rigol to
make hacking it this easy--all they needed was a SSH stack, a hardware
key, or even an obfuscated command--but that doesn't change the moral
position. The hardware is hardware, so you can hack it any way you
like. Cutting traces on the PCB to get the extra vertical bandwidth
would be perfectly fine.

Disassembling the firmware and ripping it off would not be fine.

Hacking the firmware as Dave did is a grey area, one that will become
more and more important as we go along.

As I said, it's a good lesson in product design, and an interesting
moral question that is more complicated than most folks here are willing
to see.

I think this is a really interesting topic and I'm glad there
are different opinions on it. It makes for some fun. I will
read the arguments, but I'm sure like most of us over the age
of 40 we aren't likely to make profound changes in our
hard-won opinions. But it will be intriguing to see if
someone does come up with a solid argument that changes an
opinion here or there.

Jon

 

[Jon Kirwan]

Probably because it is possible. The reason why there have been so
many great inventions

That's my take, as well. Of course, Dave can speak for himself, too!

Jon

 

[Jon Kirwan]

He sure didn't protect them.

I hope you are not pretending to argue that he should have
done so. I would hope you feel he is free to act in his own
perceived interests.

He apparently organized

One doesn't 'organize' themselves. A person of 1 is not an
organization.

an effort to hack their scopes

What is wrong with hacking something you buy?

and cost them money,

Not by the mere fact of hacking, he didn't.

and went public with it.

Ah, you mean "he cost them money __because__ he went public."
Different thing. Precision in writing words might help.

But I already addressed this pointing out that you can't know
this. And I gave a possible alternative view, as well. Which
you didn't discuss, at all. So I see no need to re-address
myself to something I've already spoken about and which you
have not responded to.

Maybe they have lawyers to help them fend for themselves.

Of course they have lawyers. At least one.

You are (not so) secretly wishing that Dave would get his
hands slapped.

You certainly have NOT made a very good case as to why, yet.

Jones still hasn't said why he did it.

So?

Jon

 

[Spehro Pefhany]

You sure talk like a US lawyer - mostly irrelevant crap.

Nobody is copying their Rigol DS1052E and selling them.
And nobody is turning 50MHz Rigols into 100MHz Rigols and SELLING THEM.

LOL, not *yet*, *perhaps*.

I'd be extremely careful about buying a 100MHz Rigol from a dubious
source. P.S. labels can be very cheap.

 

[Tom]

Since the ADCs are overclocked, it may be that Rigol selects the best
scopes to be the 100 MHz versions.

John,

I cannot understand your logic - it is ok for Rigol to overclock slow
ADCs and deprive ADC makers from income but it is not ok to "overclock"
a Rigol scope?

Tom

 

[fritz]

How about this one:

://www.highlandtechnology.com/DhttpSS/T760DS.html

That's a real transformer-isolated 100 volt pulse into 50 ohms. We've
tweaked it since we took that pic, and rise/fall are now typically
under 1 ns.

And this is a 1 GHz square wave

http://www.highlandtechnology.com/DSS/T860DS.html

The undershoot is my fault... a trace is a little too long. I'll fix
it next pass.

The higher the bandwidth the messier

I use a 20 GHz scope, and the calibration and TDR pulses are almost
perfect.

John

You claimed the modded Rigol 'kinda sucks'.
Why ? What were you expecting from a 100Mhz scope ?
You also snipped the following...
"The modded Rigol compared very well with a 100Mhz Tektronix TDS 1012."
Care to comment why a TDS 1012 also 'kinda sucks' ?

 

[Howard Eisenhauer]

It's with some interest I've read the discussions on the
legality/morality of performing this mod.

Two thoughts come to mind-

First, it's been the practice by many cellphone compamies to sell
phones to customers at less than cost, up to 50-70% off the retail
price, to attract customers with the expectation that over the course
of the contract the'll make thier money back. They protect their
investment in gaining customers this way by software locking the
phones so that they will only work on the provider's network.
Of course it didn't take long for hackers to learn how to un-lock the
phone's network restriction leading to the situation where people
would sign up for service, get their phone, then cancel the contract,
get the phone un-locked & go on a cheaper plan from the original
provider's competitor. There was a lot of talk from the providers
selling the subsidised phones about the legality of this but to my
knowledge the people offering the un-locking service operated openly &
none was ever prosecuted, beacuse at the end of the day the phones
belonged to the customer.

The second thing that come to mind is a few years back suppliers of
contact lenses (Boush & Laumb as well as Johnson & Johnson) ended up
getting sued because they were selling daily use and long term contact
lenses, with the daily use ones of course being significantly cheaper,
when in fact both types of the lenses were the exact same product
except for the packaging.

At the end of the day, unless you'ver signed something specifically
legally preventing you from making this mod then it's got to be legal.
simply by the fact it isn't illegal. Whether or not it's "moral" is
going to depend on the individual's viewpoint.

H.

 

[Trevor Wilson]

On Wed, 31 Mar 2010 11:29:12 +1100, "David L. Jones"

For those with a Rigol DS1052E oscilloscope, you can now turn it into a
100MHz DS1102E with just a serial cable:

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.

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.

Products are increasingly IP and less hardware these days, and the IP
is expensive.

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.

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.

John

The design cost is amortized over all the units. [Hey, don't worry
what the consults charges, it will go to zero as we sell a million
units.]

Rigol does themselves a disservice by having to maintain two
products. They should just sell the higher speed scope, bomb the
market, and then own it.

Destroying a market isn't usually a good way to make money in the long
run.

And it's easily possible that Rigol saves a boatload of money by having
only one assembly number to design, code, build, and test. Remember that
(as Dave discovered earlier) they're actually overclocking the ADCs on the
100 MHz model--so one can argue it's really a 50 MHz scope that Rigol
themselves hacked into a 100 MHz one.

Companies have been selling crippleware forever--the earliest example I
know of was the 6 MHz IBM PC-AT. You changed the crystal and one other
thing that I forget, and suddenly you had a blistering fast 8 MHz AT!
(Cooler than the coolest thing ever, no?) There were similar howls of
outrage over that one.

**Not even close. The real con was the Intel 486SX. It was a 486 chip, with
a deliberately disabled maths co-processor.

 

[George Jefferson]

You can't know what their manufacturing procedures are. They may
select the better scopes to be the 100 MHz versions.

John

AND you can't be sure that they don't do anything more than just twiddle a
bit, can you? You are sticking up for them as if you are 100% sure they did
absolutely nothing wrong when all the evidence supports the opposite case.
IMO they should have to prove they did nothing wrong which is quite simple.
e.g., if you made inherently different performance versions of your product
surely you can prove that they perform different?

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.

 

[John Tserkezis]

Since the ADCs are overclocked,

That's only done to cut costs. If component selection *was* an issue,
it would have been locked in hardware. A jumper perhaps, a bridge on a
track, something.

it may be that Rigol selects the best scopes to be the 100 MHz versions.

I don't think so. The testing would have occurred during the board
construction phase, before it has been programmed with firmware and fit
into a case.

It appears the ONLY difference between the 50/100Mhz version is one
character in the serial number, via unencrypted, keyboard-capable RS232
communications, on a port that's user accessible. Oh, and the sticky label.

Call it what you want, it's sloppy, they *have* been caught with their
pants down.

 

[fritz]

....

You generally have a legal right to sell it to someone else, at least
in the US. You may not in europe.

I thought it was obvious to anyone that I meant you cannot modify it and
falsely represent it for resale.
You admit you are not a lawyer, but you still react like one.

Once a scope is in my posession, converting it to 100 MHz does Rigol
no economic harm. Dave's posting detailed hacking directions to the
world does them real harm, and they may have legal recourse.

Crap.
If you have already bought one, the hack is an irrelevant but pleasant
bonus.
If you haven't bought one already, you will have to act quickly to get an
'old'
one as Rigol have already blocked the simple port hack that David repeated.
Rigol will probably benefit from all the publicity, despite looking like
idiots in the
mind of engineers, for leaving themselves so exposed.
After all is said and done many more DS1052E's will probably be sold.

Are you an anarchist or something?

What do you mean by anarchist or something ?

 

[Jamie]

This url does not open on my seamonkey but does on IE6 (with a warning
to update browser)(which I did not do)

It has nothing to do with a infections. Youtube has been posting that
warning for a while now. They are using/going to use features that are
not supported in older browsers..

I had a choice to update to IE8 or FireFox on this older PC here, I
went with Firefox. Seems to be ok..

 

[George Jefferson]

This last situation is one that _developed_ in the US due to
a law suit (or several) that took place around the time when
VisiCalc was a "big deal" in and around 1980. Prior to this
time, software was bought and sold and the older US laws
regarding rights followed that legal lagacy. If you BUY the
software, you can loan it to others, etc. What happened is
that some software manufacturers (using the term, loosely)
decided that they didn't want that legal legacy and tried
hard to pony up some "new idea." That new idea was selling
licenses to use, not direct ownership. This really didn't
have a lot of legal history to it and there was a debate as
to whether or not one could "sell" a product over the
counter, on a wide spread basis.

It all started with Microsoft. They licensed MS DOS instead of selling it to
IBM. This allowed MS to get a fee for every IBM computer sold with MS DOS on
it. Initially MS was going to sale DOS to IBM but Gates changed his mind
after the fact(not quite sure how it happened) because he did not want to
give the source code to IBM.

In a perfectly ethical world there would be no such licensing issues. If you
wanted the software you brought it outright and would not sale it or modify
it to make a profit from other peoples work. Because software is not
tangible there is nothing to stop someone from duplicating it and hence it
is quite easy to get around having to pay the owner for it. This has nothing
to do with software but with the societies ethics. The fact that piracy is
widespread simply tells us that our moral standard has drastically changed
for the worse.

"A hard days work for a hard day's pay" has been replaced with "I'll do
anything for money and **** everyone else!"

 

[Jamie]

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.

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.

Products are increasingly IP and less hardware these days, and the IP
is expensive.

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.

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.

John

Is it possible the 50 Mhz models are rejected 100mhz versions that may
have not past some test at 100Mhz bw ? Units that wouldn't pass at
100 Mhz and be ok at 50 Mhz, would be waste just through the boards out.

Personally, I would get a little upset knowing they would charge an
extra $300, with nothing more than a firmware setting change.. I would
expect different internals for that much difference. But If it was like
I suggested, then maybe some users can be happy with the possible
defected operation at 100 mhz