alt Hacker NewsRefurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope
Comments
Love this. I knew nothing about oscilloscopes until just a few months ago, when reasearched and bought one from a science lab. It wasfor a personal side project. I gutted it out and installed a mini PC inside, and now i run AI models into it. It's like my personal AI assistance. Hooked up to OpenAI realtime voice, grok bot, claude code, etc so I can command it to do stuff even when my main computer is off.
I just mainly love the retro-moder look of it. Here's a link to how it looks, for those curious:
https://x.com/slhomme/status/1965131874734584291
I had now idea there was such a huge second-hand market for those. It was such a great opportunity to learn about this tech.
10 GS/sec is very impressive as far as I'm concerned! One sample every 20mm or so at typical transmission line speed.
That said, anything with a floppy drive scares me because it undeniably indicates how old it is. My SDS7102V is no Tektronix, but an honest 1 GS/sec and at the time, under $200 on eBay.
I recently did something similar with a TDS7154B. Rather than going with an IDE/PATA drive I was able to use the SATA Gen1 ports on the motherboard and a molex-sata power adapter to use a modern SSD.
Yeah 1 GHz is nice, but that tiny 200 MHz Siglent is going to be much more useful in practice for most things.
Speaking of boat anchors, I'm trying to get my company to buy a DSA91304a (13 GHz scope with SERDES debugging). ~$44K with all the options, but still Windows-XP. The Windows-7 ones unfortunately don't have the options I want. Maybe there is a hack..
A bit ago a semi-retired guy came back to help with some stuff including debugging serial ports. It was very cool to see him fiddle with the knobs and be like "oh those squiggles look good" "no that doesn't look right" etc. https://i.imgur.com/R5aEXbq.jpeg
Meanwhile total mystery to everyone else how to operate/interpret the machine but a lot of fun
Is the PC mainboard separate from all the tek ASIC etc stuff? If so, what's the interface? PCMCIA? PCI?
I'm just wondering how difficult it would be to use a more modern bit of kit in there instead of the Celeron.
The TDS500, 600 and 700 series can expand memory by removing zero ohm resistors.
Give it a month and the acquisition ASICs will blow up and the caps will eat through the board traces. Can’t stand these scopes.
Flebay has some used ones around $1.5k. I wonder how much this model MSRP brand new? Either way, $300 is a steal!
Many fond memories of using these. Glad someone is keeping them going after 20+ years of service.
s2idle in vertical Hz.
I went through a similar process recently with an HP/Agilent 54845A scope (1.5 Ghz, 8 Gsa combined) - a great tool if you need reasonably fast rise times and a reasonably fine time base resolution - the only issue is that it has an abysmally low sample memory for today's standards, so you get to see the trigger and "just a bit more". Well the other issue is that it pushes a lot of air... Like a lot, jumbo jet a lot. The scope luckily was in great shape and had a fresh test cert from not long ago.
I was going down the same route as the blog post (MSATA->PATA adapter), but simply imaging the HDD onto flash also didn't work.
The scope had to go into storage so I never finished this, but the SSD was being detected albeit at a lower capacity and no amount of twiddling with LBA and CHS geometry made a difference. My next step is going to be zeroing the drive, booting the scope with it as secondary, and then imagining it from within DOS/Windows. My hope is that the data will just end up at some offset. Or not even imaging it - just partitioning it, formatting it and doing XCOPY + SYS.
You may want to image the drive every so often and accessing the drive is a bit of a bastard (fewer than 32 screws on the HP but it's a pain regardless) - so it might make sense to actually get an SD->PATA adapter and mount it onto a PCI blanking plate, so that you can take it out easily. You may need a longer ribbon cable. There are also some 2.5 inch HDD brackets that mount onto a PCI blanking plate. Possibly a DIY job to replace the FDD with a plate that has the SD card mounted. Mine came with a ZIP drive.
I added the following software extras to the OS which I would recommend to anyone with an old scope like this that has an Ethernet port:
- An SNTP client so that you don't have to worry about the time and date (https://www.timesynctool.com/) - open source, win95 and up, just disable all logging to disk so as not to introduce extra writes and drive wear.
- TightVNC (1.3.10 I think) - a version that works on older Windows. Accessing it while the scope app is running slows things down significantly, so this is only for configuration changes and whatnot, also this particular scope writes directly to the VGA framebuffer, so you don't actually get to see the scope output via VNC!
- Shared some folders from the scope. This required a significant amount of fuckery to mount an SMB1 drive elsewhere without ruining one's existing Samba config, but it helps quite a bit to be able to exchange files with the scope.
Hardware extras that proved useful in a lab setting:
- One of those cheap VGA to USB frame grabber adapter things - they are detected as a video device, don't need drivers and you can watch your scope with VLC or your OS's built-in camera app.
- A remote-controlled power outlet. Speaks for itself - no need to touch the scope to shut down and restart an experiment from wherever you are.
- A GPIB to USB adapter if your scope has a GPIB/IEEE 488 port. Current Linux support is in a bit of a state, but anyway, this will allow you some degree of automation when reading the math / stats / other data, and will sometimes allow you to do more than the scope's UI will. I know for example that with GPIB I can control the signal on the AUX port on my scope, for which the GUI has no options.
- Not tried yet: this scope uses a PS/2 mouse (remember that they are not hot-pluggable) and a DIN keyboard. This bad boy: https://github.com/rasteri/HIDman - will let you plug in your wireless USB dongle and control your scope with your everyday keyboard and mouse.
The above significantly improves the "workflow" so that you hardly need to touch your scope or even swing your chair, or can use it remotely, and applies to most of the late 90s - early 2000s Windows scopes.
I just had claude walk me through refurbishing a Rohde & Schwarz signal generator from the 90s. It feels pretty cool getting a multi thousand dollar piece of equipment for 60 bucks even if you have no idea what you'll use it for.