This work was inspired by the efforts of, who spent some time controlling the Rigol with Linux and Python. It’s a simple tool that does one job, glory and hallelujah, people are still designing tools this way. Testing has been done on OS X, and it probably works on Linux and Windows. A PNG of whatever is on the screen then appears on your drive. The usage of this python script is as simple as plugging the DS1054Z into your USB port and running the script. Now there’s a simple python script that grabs a screen cap from a Rigol scope.
One small problem with the ‘Zed is the fact that capturing an image from the screen is overly complicated, and the official documentation requires dedicated software and a lot of rigolmarole. That means there’s a wealth of hardware hacks for this oscilloscope. If you don’t have an oscilloscope, this is the scope that has the power and features you need, it’s cheap, and the people who do hardware hacks already have one.
We here at Hackaday expect a small, cheap USB/microcontroller dongle thingy that automagically updates the DS2072 to show up in our inbox any day now.
This can, in fact, be accomplished with just about any microcontroller with a Python interpreter.Ī fairly uninformative demo video is available below, or you could check out the EEVBlog thread where this mod was conceived here. The only fault of the hack is the scope resetting each time it’s powered off. There’s no internal modifications necessary for this mod it works simply by sending a few engineering unlock codes to the scope over USB, a simple task that implemented with a Raspberry Pi and a bit of Python code. A great mod that turns an $800 oscilloscope into one with the features of a $1600 scope.
Design decisions in one model are sometimes carried over to different product lines, so eventually someone would figure out how to turn the 70 MHz DS2072 scope into the 200 MHz DS2202. With a simple software update, you can turn the 50 MHz Rigol o’scope into a model with 100 MHz of bandwidth. There’s a reason for that – they’re so easily upgraded. Rigol scopes are finding their way onto the workbenches of makers the world over.