Tektronix TDS3014
Last month I purchased a Tektronix TDS3014 oscilloscope off eBay. It was a bit pricey, but I thought probably worth it. As much as I love the TDS 420A, it's a bit big, and I can't really use it at my desk. The 3014 is much slimmer, and doesn't take up more than around 20cm of depth on my desk. It also has a colour display, rather than (just) green.
So far it's been a pleasure to use. It came with the two "application modules" - TDS3TRG (Advanced Trigger) and TDS3FFT (FFT). Having recently been doing a fair bit with video (there will hopefully be a very detailed post about LaserDiscs soon…), I thought it would be nice to get the TDS3VID (Extended Video) module. No one seems to sell these modules online so I started googling for hacks.
It turns out the application modules are just finger contacts hooked
up to a 24C02 chip. That's a 256 byte EEPROM which can be accessed over
I2C. The modules can be easily opened by prying the sides up using a
scalpel. Others had demonstrated that by changing a few bytes (e.g. TRG)
to ENG, it would unlock all features of the scope,
including some unreleased beta features. I thought I may as well!
I wired it up to my Glasgow Interface Explorer, which has a 24x programming applet. Very conveniently, Tektronix left the WR enable pin tied to ground (active low), so there was no need for any soldering.
glasgow run memory-24x --pulls --pin-scl 0 --pin-sda 1 -V5 -W 1 -f 20 read 0 256 -f TDS3TRG.rom
# modify with a hex editor "TDS3TRG" -> "TDS3ENG"
glasgow run memory-24x --pulls --pin-scl 0 --pin-sda 1 -V5 -W 1 -f 20 write0 -f TDS3ENG.rom
And look, it works!
While I disagree with the use of software licenses to enable functionality of hardware, I think if you're buying into that ecosystem, it's fair to pay for it. In this case, I was unable to, since no one sells these modules anymore.
Since I was in the mood for oscilloscope malarky, I decided to also upgrade the firmware, which can be downloaded from the Tektronix website. Going from 2.11 (sadly not 2.11BSD) to 3.41, I didn't really notice anything different, although it did insist on doing a 10 minute self calibration, which was moderately interesting to watch.
In other news, I fixed a pair of jeans this morning. They had torn open in an unusual place. Stitched back together it looks like they have a scar, which is kind of cool. I've been working on a couple of other projects recently, which I'm hoping to post about soon. The first is a repair of a LaserDisc player. This is very much a group project at Nottingham Hackspace, although I do accept the blame for starting it (it's been challenging!). I've also been working on an applet for the Glasgow Interface Explorer, allowing it to talk to GPIB devices. It works, but I'm waiting for some PCBs (glasgow "addons") to arrive. Bye for now!
Related posts:
Wanting to leave a comment?
Comments and feedback are welcome by email (aaron@nospam-aaronsplace.co.uk).