Hi it's product review and tear down time again. Yes! I'm really enthusiastic about this one as you can probably tell it's one of these mini Dsos. In fact it is called the mini DSO it's also known as the Q DSO um from Doityourself Tool.com and uh Figo on the forums sent me this so thanks Figo he want new product they got apparently brand new and they wanted me to check it out I think they've sent one to my At Mike's electric stuff as well and Well on paper it's not that bad. 130 odd us 40 MHz analog bandwidth so it claims 200 Meg samples per second sounded pretty good right? And if you know in theory if you can get a little pocket, do Oro like this to get a performance like that.

Beauty? all right. but I don't know, look at the box, it's a bit. it's a bit crusty really. I'm not not getting a good vibe n it's anyway.

I'll give it the benefit of the doubt, but as people know, I'm not that Keen on these pocket dsos they feel a very small Niche they are not a replacement for well I have never found one that is a replacement for a you know, a low-end entry level. DSO it's just not. but as a pocket oscilloscope, that's how I'm going to review it as a pocket scope. but I well I'd be surprised if it meets the specs it claims.

But anyway, give it the benefit of the doubt. let's go. And here we go. Oh man, look at this case.

it's a shocker. Anyway, you open it up static shielding bag. Here's our scope. We'll take a look at it.

We get a Uh probe which does look like a standard switchable x 10 probe. It looks all right. We'll have a look at the connector. it's not a standard BNC uh of course.

but hey the prob looks like it's well, you know it's It's not too shabby at all as far as uh, you know, as far as something like this for $130 pocket scope, at least it looks and feels like a proper time. 10 switchable probe Beautiful one hung low power adapter KY Yeah, you're going to need some KY All right to remove this from where I'm probably going to shove it man. yeah, be used only at home. Yeah right, don't trust that as far as I can throw it.

Um, and we have a USB charging cable and we have a manual. Oh look at a funky little dude there who's uh, got a his scope probe cudos user manual and uh, that's not instilling a lot of confidence in me. It's four pages worth and then it goes into uh Chinese go figure. But anyway, the specs are.

we're looking at what do we got here 200 samples per second so it claims 40 MHz analog bandwidth. Well yeah, we'll see um standard 8it bit ad converter and the gain range at 10 MTS to 5 volts with a plusus 5 volt maximum on the times one position or Um I assume plusus 50 volts There we go with the times: 10 probe DC Accuracy: 3% Standard 1 Meg 25 puff input impedance great coupling DC Only are they kidding? no AC coupling at fail Gez: you got to at least have AC coupling on the thing that's just garbage diode input protection yeah, that's all I'd expect um and it doesn't have looks uh doesn't have anything El buff buffer size 4K memory there we go trigger Auto normal uh signal. It's got an auto set function great. It's got some measurement cursors and that's it.

3 1/2 in LCD 320x 240 and a 1 a lithium ion battery. 2 hours of continuous use. Great! There you go. It's 110x 75 by 13 mm so you know.

Definitely pocket size now. I've had this thing uh, charging up for quite some time so it should be get full use out of it. Let's take off the protective film there and uh, it looks like it's one of these reused MP3 cases. In fact, you can see it down there.

It's got MP5 I'm not sure if you can get that, it's probably the glare there. the uh, that's the glare from my new strip LED lighting up there above the bench. but uh, you can see that it's got MP5 written on there. It looks like it's been blacked out with a texture or something like that.

What an epic fail. Actually a stand which can sort of be put in two positions which isn't too bad, you know at all. Okay, that's a pass and that just Clips off of course. So we'll leave that off and um, it's a classic reused MP3 case.

It's got a non-existent memory card slot there. it's got a reset button. I'm not sure if there's I haven't taken it apart yet, so I'm not sure if there's actually a reset button behind that, but what this looks like is a lock button. It's not.

It's actually the power button. It's actually a physical onoff button. So they've got that wrong. which looks like You' Think this would be the power button up here, but it's not.

It's crazy. It's a menu button. And then we've got our input connector here. V V+ V minus is um, the DC rail.

so they've got that right. USB charging there and some up down buttons which have been, uh, you know, repurposed as the uh forward and back button. So it it's just you know, a rehashed MP3 player and it gets worse. Microphone: Little speaker thing doesn't have the speaker, it's been removed, the microphone's been taken out, and it's got the headphone jack for the the headphone symbol for this scoping board.

You got to be kidding me. Is it too much to ask to just have this thing, you know, and just design the case. uh, properly. at least silk screen it properly.

Got to be kidding me. Now the connector on the probe here. it looks kind of like an SMB type connector but I don't think it uh is actually an SMB I don't have another SMB um any SMB stuff in the lab here to plug that into. but anyway, it's you know it's It's not bad.

It's better than the 3.5 mm uh Jacks that are used on um some of the other uh pocket Scopes out there that's for sure and it is quite a nice fit and it sort of locks into place and really you know is is a bit hard to remove there so that is that is good I'd at least give that a thumbs up. that is a step in the right direction for these pocket. Scopes So let's power this turd up here and see what we get. It's the switch on the side here.

It's not that power button that's a big fail. Instra: Whoa. I Missed it. Missed it.

Instra Star is that who uh actually produces this thing and we've got a basic screen and it immediately jumps into our scope. Waveform: There you go. Nice! One of the first things I've noticed though using this thing is the battery up here. It says it's low battery.

look it's red and it's You know it's showing that it's like empty. It's pretty much empty symbol there. but I've I've charged this thing up so it it looks to stick the same regardless of what the charge level is. Complete Fail.

All right. I'm feeding in a basic 1 khz 1vt peak-to Peak uh sine wave with no offset. And as I mentioned before, this thing a huge massive limitation is that it does not have AC coupling. It's just it's just useless.

It's practically a fail right there. I Don't I even know why I'm bloody Continuing, but continue I Will and this seems to be the um Auto sorry. this one down here is the Auto Range button There it is auto up there and it it can't even measure it. can't even Auto Range Auto scale to a basic 1 KZ Uh, you know one.

VT Peak-to Peak sine wave If it can't do that, it's it's absolutely useless that functionality does not work at all. Yet another fail. So let's see if we can actually get this waveform on the screen. Now as it turns out, we're 5 Vols per division here.

Okay, and as sure enough, you know it says volts plus minus there and that actually does the job. Okay, so we're 1vt per division. Okay, let's take it down to 500 molts per division. We got a 1vt peak to Peak sine wave.

We're at 100 NS per division. That's no good for us. So we need to, uh, change the these ones here. which you know it' be nice if it was time base, plus minus or something, but it's not.

So we're going to get this thing down here we go. Our sine wave is coming in sorry I think I've got that on times. yeah I've got that on times 10. There we go.

So we've got our 1vt Peak to Peak sine wave 500 MTS per Division and there we go. You can see we're at two divisions there so that is actually 1vt Peak to Peak So it is actually measuring spot on there. Go figure. 200 MTS Peak to Peak Yeah, there we go.

So it can actually measure the signal reasonably accurately. Can see the uh, it's got noise on that check. Check that out. I mean that is you know that's this S Wave is coming from my Um Agilant 3000 build-in waveform Gen and it's going to be a lot better than that.

I Can assure you. So it's got this. It's got this high frequen quy noise on there. it's just hopeless.

Anyway, it does actually able to measure the signal and one thing I've noticed is it seems to clip there. Look it it. Clips Okay, down the bottom here. but it Clips before it gets to the top of the waveform display window there.

What the hell is going on with that thing? That's just nuts. It's absolutely nuts anyway. I'm not absolutely not happy with that at all. and you see the Alsn kicking in there? really going to town there? And anyway H it's just oh man, just hate this thing already.

and I'm assuming that this little marker over here is the trigger marker because it's got DC offset. but it doesn't seem to be a way to actually, uh, shift it. There seems to be no vertical, um, offset adjustment at all. and here we go.

We'll call up the menu system. You use this power symbol up here and that calls up the menu like that and these ones actually cycle through the menu. So we've got these are the main menus. These are for the Um on screen measurements.

Here you can see the ones that are ticked that are enabled at the moment Auto normal and single triggering. It doesn't even label the menu as as triggering. and then we've got that Rising falling. either or none.

Now it was falling. Actually, it was yeah, right. So hang on. let's get out of here.

let's have a look. Yep, rise in there we go. So there's the yeah, there's the trigger point by the looks of it. Rising Edge Let's try the falling Edge and see if that works.

Oh man. menu is so confusing. You know you these two cycle through the menu in the horizontal Direction and then the Dual use uh, vertical scale button over here is the one that you go down and you select it and you go like that and it should be now falling. Edge There we go.

We've at least got the falling Edge H does kind of work. This is like the trigger level follows like this and so let's put the trigger level right. It's the scroll rate of these buttons is terrible by the way. it's faster to just manually click them like that than is to hold it down and do the auto repeat thing.

The auto repeat is just awful. So let's put it up near the top there and see. Well let's let's put it there for example and see if we can get that to. I Don't even if you have to set I don't think you set it that doesn't do anything I think it's just automatically set.

there. We go. So our trigger point is now up here. it's above and as you can see it hasn't triggered, it's gone like that.

But if we y we're still above it. So it does move the trigger point with the scale so it it's at least doing what it's supposed to be doing properly. And let me turn up the uh uh voltage on that and uh, we should find that will go straight in. So amplitude there we go.

so it does lock in so it kind of. You know it does a real basic Bare Bones job of triggering on a basic signal. and if we turn on a 1 khz square wave here at the same signal level then you can see that signal. Don't know.

Not sure what that glitch was there I Don't know if you saw that on camera? Yeah, there we go. It's just glitching there. and um, it's yeah. You see that that Ripple superimposed on there.

that's not down the bottom like this. It's crazy. And one thing, of course this thing doesn't have. The probe does not have a compensation, uh, adjustment on it.

So I think we'll fine. That's going to be an issue if we up the frequency. Okay, I've turned on a 1 MHz Square wave at the same. Look at the what? Oh man.

Okay, well, that's yeah. that's the undershoot. All right. So let's uh, let's scale this thing back out here.

We go there, we go all right. now. Look here's this is a 1 MHz Square wave. Look, it's just absolutely useless.

Let me, uh, get the trigger set in on that. So oh man, it's I Keep doing this. Keep hitting these buttons wrong. So let's get it way back down.

so it triggers properly. There we go, it should. Yeah, it triggers now. But look at the undershoot and the overshoot, it's It's absolutely useless.

There's no way there's no compens ation adjustment on here or on the probe. You can't adjust this thing. It's absolutely useless for any high frequency detail at all. for a 1 mahz square wave, right? And this thing's supposed to have a 40 MHz analog bandwidth.

Got to be kidding me. and what we've got down here. this: 200 MHz I Think that's the sample rate. I.E 200 megas sample per second.

Oh, there we go is. Auto set. Auto set's working on a square wave on a 1 MHz Square wave. Go figure.

Let me turn. so turn that right out. turn the voltage right up like that hit Auto set. Oh there we go.

Look at that. Got no overshoot now at that range. There There we go. We go up a range so these lower ranges sorry, higher voltage ranges.

Um, there's no overshoot and undershot on that 1 MHz Square wave. but obviously it's switching in another part of the input Mar or something something like that which is on the input attenuator and anything that approaches more than half. you know, like like what are we two divisions Peak to Peak there anything over that. it switches into this range and it's just.

it's it's useless. It's man, you can see that as signals there. but apart from that, fail. And by the way, I'll mention the screen.

it's not too bad. the angle and all that sort of stuff. I've now got a th000 Lux here in the the lab. By the way.

the lab is really bright now so on my bench thousand luck now. You'll probably notice the difference in uh, this video, um, and uh, subsequent videos from now on. Lighting's much better, but the screen's okay. It's by the way.

I didn't mention the thing it. You know it feels okay. It's It's not bad. It's better than I expected.

Actually, it looks like it could survive a few knocks. The plastic is okay, nothing to write home about, but yeah, it's You know it, it. It's not bad if it was if it actually performed properly. but it's not.

It's performance just seems to be a heap. crap. Look at the Jitter, look at the Jitter on that. It's pretty awful.

Pretty darn awful. So this is only at 10. MHz This thing has a claimed analog performance of a bandwidth of 40 MHz Got to be kidding me. And here it is at 20 megahertz, which is the maximum frequency on my Agilant 3000 scope waveform genen and the Jitter is almost making that thing unusable.

It's just absolutely terrible. I'm not even going to get out a better instrument. It doesn't deserve to have its performance measured. it's just nah.

it's just crap. And another annoying thing. Soon as you call up the menu, it just stops processing, stops displaying anything, and goes to the menu. That's Just hopeless.

I Mean geez, You know you can't multitask with this thing and that makes like setting up your trigger level and stuff like that. Really, You know it's sort of like a blind deal here, because you got to. You know it. It doesn't even keep the existing waveform on the screen there it man.

Complete disappointment at every turn and the fail never ends with this thing. Not only is it not measuring our 1vt Peak to Peak properly there. where at 500 Ms per division is showing a hell of a lot more than that. Look what happens if I turn it down down to sorry, turn it right.

If I turn it up right, it's okay. it scales down like that. That's fine. It's what you expect.

Let's go up at the signal level okay and then jump down to 200 and then 100. It's jump back to where it was at 500. at 50 Mill volts per division, it should be way off scale. It's just a complete and utter failure.

It's just garbage. Look 10 ms per division. You would think that you're measuring. You know a it's only you know? Uh, 20 40, 60, 80, 100 molts or something like that.

No, and it's telling you Volts Peak to Peak 150 molts. All right. So I'm being a bit harsh there. that was a 20 me Hertz I'll take it back down to 1 mahz.

and what do you know? it does work fine. There we go. It overs scales, but it gives you that weird thing on this level here. it Clips like that.

but you go down in scale and it Clips further and further and it does at least asteris out. You know the symbol to show you that it's overs scaled So that's all right. So at some point in the you know in the sample rate um, scheme of things, it does go into that weird mode where it you know it gives you false readings. A man, it's just.

ah, it's a complete cludge. And yes, it does actually have cursors. If you go down here, you can turn on cursor one for example. So we'll turn on cursor one bang.

and yeah, we have a a bloody menus I Keep getting them mixed up. It's hopeless, right? We've got our two cursors there and it seems to be doing the business. This uh M button takes your Cycles through your various things. Zed Mode I assume is uh Zoom mode or something.

m is move mode. so if we select if we go to the M mode there, we can actually move our waveform left and right there. And once again, if you hold it down, the auto repeat capability of that thing is useless. So maybe if we do this enough times, we should see this Zoom window move across there.

So there you go like that. but there's no way that I can find to actually snap it back to the center. So in that respect, it's very unfriendly. And C1 there's we can move our cursors like that once again, no Auto repeat.

so it makes it really annoying. And then we can go to Cursor two up down. And if we go back to Zed and well, Zed is our usual uh mode there that we had before which is our time base back and forth. And this power button here actually does work as a power button.

If you press it, it goes into a sleep State and uh, but you can see a red LED in there is still on I Don't know why you would actually want that when you know a power switch just works physical power switch. you see the lead is switched off there and bang. we're back into it. Don't even know why I'm bothering.

but here's the noise floor: 10 MTS per division no probe plugged in and that's our performance. over Slow Time bases There you go. Going right up here to the fastest time base: five NCS per one nanc per division. Yeah, right.

Give me a break. Look at that. it's just. it's pretty awful.

I've got it in single mode here and it's in run mode currently. so M over here will stop it. Okay, And then you press the start button here, which kind of makes sense. Okay, you put it back into start mode and it will apparently sit there and uh, run right? But I think it occasionally captures a signal on there, right? Let's do that.

Wait. Okay, so we're waiting for our trigger. let's do our trigger. and there we go.

Bang It got it. Okay, so it kind of does. Eh. it does do the single shot capture thing, but now it's saying it's back in run mode instead of in stop mode.

It's just single shot captured that waveform. So what the hell's going on there? I I Don't understand I Don't get it at all useless, but it kind of is working. it's waiting for the trigger and it does do its single shot capture thing. So H man Works In theory, I'm really I'm just not going to bother to test this thing any further.

It's just it's just a useless toy. So Yeah Bugger it I've had enough of this stupid thing. Let's just take it apart and see what's inside. At least that might be interesting.

Here we go: I Tried to prize the thing uh, open and then I realized it actually had some screws under the LCD here. Oops and look, if you look what they've done with with this, you can see the MP5 thing there and they've just gone over it with a texture rubbed it out. It's a atrocious. Tada There's our LCD and our main board.

Rip the LCD out. Nothing doing there. really. it's pretty boring as bat poo so let's not worried about that.

What we need is the board here. Tada Look look at that. The battery's not even. battery's not not even uh fixed to the bottom.

it's just floating in there. Got to be kidding me. But it does seem that the battery at least has a protection piece of be on it. Wow, You do get something for your money now.

The first thing you notice about this board is that well it's not too bad at all. It's quite well laid out actually. I Rather like it. There's not much in it.

of course there's probably uh, less than I what I would have expected, especially on the uh front end uh, side of things down around here. But look, you know they've got the uh ground plane split down there joined right in here. so they you know they know what they're doing. Flip it over here.

it's um, there's a little bit of bodess in terms of the uh of the connector soldered down in here and stuff like that. but yeah, I'm I'm quite quite pleased with the board actually. And our main device here is an Altera Cyclone 2. No surprises there at all.

We've got some memory over here coupled into that. No surprises. We got a radio um LCD controller here. We got ADC up here, which we'll take a look at and another probably an analog uh switch down there and some basic uh, power supply and charging circuitry around here.

But really, there's uh, not much to it at all. So there's the radio r872, LCD controller. There's our Cyclone 2. It's an EP uh, 2C 5T one4 there.

and over here there's our Samsung memory and uh, not much doing here. That would be a JTAG um interface for the Fpga and that there would be the configuration prom for the Fpga So it's it holds the code so when it boots up, uh, we have a 100 MHz oscillator here, so they're obviously multiplying that by two to get their 200 MHz sample rate and over here. let's take a look at the ADC and Tada Not, well, a surprise and no surprise. Uh, really, it's an analog device is AD 9288 or so it claims I don't know.

It could be a cheap knockoff. and it's the 100 MHz version. You'll note that this is the same device used in the Ryol famous Ryol Ds1052e where they overclock the part up to 100 MHz and they claim to have the genuine 100 MHz part in here I Dare without it Anyway, Um, so you know it's got a reasonable ADC in this thing. And uh, there we go.

We got a 74 HC 4051. There you go analog switch. So these these resistors here look to be the Um, basically the input attenuator really? So that's selecting the input range there. and that's why we're getting piss poor performance out of this thing.

I Mean you know the front end just leaves so much to be desired here? Anyway, here's our input connector. If we flip it over, you'll see that the input connector very dodgy, sort of hand solded onto there. We've got a uh, a 100 ohm input resistor there and that goes into and then we've got our trimmer. We've got two trimmer caps here does that say anything? C con and C58.

So we got two trimmer caps there to adjust it and then just you know, a dodgy um attenuator system there. and you know, really? I don't know what these are little uh opamps or something. um, single opamp packages or something like that, perhaps? Uh, not entirely sure. And then we've got our DC Todc converter up here and the battery charger battery charger will be probably that device there a low Dropout voltage regulator.

it's a Triple 17 classic there. And what we've got here is this is interesting. We've got an St Microcontroller by the looks of it, and if you can see there, that's an 8s 103 St microcontroller and that's like a low-end um 8bit you know, 8K flash microcontroller. so not very powerful at all, but you don't really need that when you've got a a dedicated Uh display chip handling the display.

So really, you know the micro only has to do you know, pretty basic uh measurement, uh stuff and onscreen display. you know, cursor generation and you know it just doesn't handle the buttons and do a few calculations and things. so it really doesn't need anything more powerful than that. And I guess they decided that they' use that instead of a soft processor inside a higher end um Fpga than the Uh Cyclone 2 here.

And while I said this layout is quite, uh, neat and they seem to know what they're doing well, they didn't seem to you know? this is a 100 mahz oscillator up here and it's you Know they should have put that closer to the chip over here. that's you know, bit poor. I mean it's it's going to work, but yeah, it's not good practice. Looks like our programming interface there for our uh St microcontroller and that's about all she wrote.

and on the back here we have yazing. DNZ At1 126.com Is that the actual designer? There you go. Can you send an email that looks like an email address? There we go. If anyone wants to email the designer, go right ahead.

And also the tiny little lever on the power switch there doesn't really instill a lot of confidence. You're not going to get a huge number of uses out of this thing. I don't think and the LCD if you care wesing image Co and what's inside this power adapter? I'm pretty much going to be able to tell you that it's a fail. Ah, there we go.

We lift it out and let's take this turd out. and well, okay, that's that's better than what. I I expected. Um, it's but you we have a look at there.

ah, you know the clearance there. you know, not that great. but at least it's at least they're actually doing some job there. Is that a transist or is that a a regulator? I'm not sure what's going on there, but ah yeah, I've seen a hell of a lot worse, but I'd still throw that in the uh crap category directly into the bin and we have a Chong Brand 105 C rated Uh 400 volt cap after the diode.

Bridge Oh man, they've gone for the full wave doode. Bridge A Spared no expense. They've used like a reasonably beefy, uh output diode here, and they've got some Uh suppression across the Uh, across the transforma there. Yeah, Ah man, they've done the absolute bare minimum required to get one of these things, but I don't and probably never never pass any local type approval.

There you go. It's a TL 431, so at least they've got some sort of regulation on the output, but this sucker is destined for the landfill and well, that's where it's going. So there you go: the Q DSO from doityourself at Tools.com 130 bucks. It's probably worth about 30 bucks, not even that.

Don't waste your money on it, it's it's just it fails in practically every respect, which is a bit of a shame. It's not a bad little case, not a bad little form factor. If they didn't reuse the MP3 case, you know, at least came with a a proper scope probe uncompensated of course, which was a fail. but you know these pocket scopes could be capable of doing the job if they just get the small things right.

but this fails in practically every area. Man, don't bother wasting your money I don't know how it Compares with the DSO Nano I have never physically tried a DSO Nano so don't ask. Um, jump on the forums if you want to discuss it. I'm sure somebody in there has done a a comparison or something like that, but this doesn't compare with anything except a steaming pile of dog t cuz that's pretty much what it is.

Bit of a shame though, cuz I I You know I think there's a good Market there for these pocket Dsos. They really if if somebody designs and builds one properly and puts a bit of work in there even if it costs 150 bucks or something. fine, you know, like. But no, don't bother.

even there's a first scope. Watch my video, Get go get an analog scope for example. But you know to even just to in your toolbox and and uh, you know, get just view a basic signal. It practically fails at that.

There's no battery. The battery indication doesn't work. There's no AC coupling. You got to be kidding me.

It's buggy as all hell. The attenuators all over the shop doesn't even get close to it. Bandwidth performance. The single shot captures all.

The menu system sucks. really. There's only one thing for it. a thumbs down and a Vice palom.