yugpmoc and Hydrawerk, Nice work.
BTW, the manual looks pretty good/ok.
Yes, it's not terrible. Thanks for sharing it, CompGuy.
On the downside searches for "decode", "ASCII", "I2C", and "SPI" don't seem to reveal any entries
Because there are none. I read the whole thing. I'm always on the lookout for newly arriving economy scopes that can be recommended to beginners. And with Hantek, hope springs eternal.
...maybe decoding functionality will appear in a manual for optional accessories.
Or maybe it will never appear in a manual, because it doesn't exist in the scope. I'm not sure where you got the idea it has any such capability (wishful thinking?). But there's nothing on the Hantek site to suggest it currently either triggers on, or decodes, ANY protocols. Or ever will.
The section on arbitrary waveforms isn't real extensive either.
You sir are the master of understatement!
Maybe the product does more than the manual suggests
Well, in Hantek's defense, they wouldn't be the first Chinese manufacturer in that situation. Especially with a brand-new product. Lot's of Rigol products, e.g., get extensive manual updates after the product has been released.
One thing I did like about the manual is there are lots of screen shots depicting the menu structure. That's something Rigol has been pretty lax with, of late. But I can't see much functionality there that hasn't already been exposed by descriptions in the manual. It's too bad CompGuy couldn't finish his tour of the menus, before his unit crapped out on him.
In place of the protocol capabilities, it does support two features everyone else has been leaving out... Alternate timebases, and ETS. Which likely explains the 2,000 wfms update rate. Also, lack of intensity grading. Lack of persistence. Lack of...
One other handicap, when comparing to the likes of a 1074-S, is the memory capacity of 1M analog samples, total. Split between the 4-channels. The LA also has a separate 1M samples. They don't say how deep the ARB gen memory is, but the limitation of 8-bit samples is kind of disappointing.
CompGuy, I don't mean to run down your new toy (though you may feel like driving over it a time or two
), and it does offer a lot of features in one package, for a lower price [than] anyone else offers. Naturally, in that case it won't be surprising if the features are weaker, and what will be most important is if they are adequate for your needs. I hope they are. The core specs look decent, though not impressive. And the screen seems well laid-out, and readable. I was a bit befuddled by the various pix in the manual though, because the channel colors (on-screen, front panel, etc.) seemed to be shuffled around quite a bit. And they somehow managed to mix the FFT cursors up on Frequency vs. Magnitude.
Worst right now though is your negative OOB experience. But any manufacturer can have some of their first production run suffer from infant mortality. Hopefully you were one of few who will have that fate, and they will ship you a shiny new one quickly, erasing the bad taste from your mouth. I'm actually a bit more concerned about what the connector misalignments imply, than I am the failure of the front panel controls. Good luck!, and please keep us informed how things go for you.