Rigol Oscilloscope Teardown And Repair

oscope_teardown

[Hotsolder] encountered a bad encoder in his Rigol Oscilloscope, so he opened it up in order to replace the damaged part. According to him, it was quite an adventure, so he documented the disassembly and component swap for the benefit of anyone else out there that might have to do the same.

The teardown is in the form of a slideshow, which is available on his site. The images are all pretty well annotated, so you should be able to follow along quite easily if you happen to be tearing one apart yourself. There’s not a ton of exotic things to see inside the scope, it pretty much contains what you would expect to see if you cracked one open.

The encoder replacement went off without a hitch, and he even took pictures of the defective one to discuss how it works.

It’s definitely a quick and interesting read if you are simply curious about oscilloscopes, or if you happen to need to dismantle yours.

[Thanks, oakkar7]

10 thoughts on “Rigol Oscilloscope Teardown And Repair

    1. I just replaced the horizontal scale with a Bourns PEC12R-4120F-S0012 (12 mm, 12 ppr, detents), and the horizontal position with a Bourns PEC12R-4020F-S0024 (12 mm, 24 ppr, no detents)

  1. My first thought was how empty the oscilloscope was. Most of the inside is taken up by that clunky power supply with heat sinks sticking way up. It looks like they could make the entire thing three or four times smaller/thinner without much effort. Not that there is much benefit to making it much smaller– good user interface requires some space. Just a dramatic difference from the insides of the old Teks.

  2. error404: Yes, but DX doesn’t provide any real warranty, you could be waiting weeks or months for the scope to clear customs (and then end up paying import tax), and Rigol NA has said they won’t service scopes under warranty brought into the US via grey-market imports. I bought mine from Saelig for $400 with free shipping and have been very satisfied with them thus far, and they sent me a free scope bag. As for the Rigol itself, I’ve found that it’s quite a nice piece of kit – the software is utterly useless though, unfortunately. I’m dealing with some adventures in Python to write my own software..

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