A couple of points.
Dave, where are all the twelve year old trolls, who only a couple of videos back were claiming that you were somehow in the pay of the equipment suppliers, such as Rigol? Hellooooooooooo??? Nah, can't hear 'em...
While I was not one of those "twelve year old trolls" and I have made No such accusations about Dave, I would point out that this Video certainly had a different feel about it than Dave’s normal video's and I am pretty sure it was partly meant to address those people directly! You can read into that what you want, in any case I liked the teardown a lot.
Since this whole DP832 series started I have been saying that I would rather have my 2x (HP E3615A) power supplies any day of the week over a DP832 and that was met with a few negative replies. The fact is that Dave and many of you guys talk a lot about the building things to a price point, using a $1 part versus $2.50 part but then the whole notion of that seems to go out the window when your buying equipment. You need to use that same logic when buying test gear and reflect that same logic onto the company your thinking of buying from.
If your Rigol and your making a power supply, the first thing you do is work out a basic list of features and then you set a price point per unit so the engineers know what kind of budget they are designing around. If you put that into a nice Pie chart and start to slice it up, in the case of the DP832 you need to take out a nice little slice for the microcontroller related section and include the costs involved for all the software development and the extra shielding etc. For a power supply that sells for around $420 it probably costs about $220 to manufacture and at this low a price point once you take out the expenses involved in all the Microcontroller stuff and that nice Toroid your not left with a whole lot of money to make a proper linear power supply with high margins and a solid interior and exterior construction.
When you compare that to say an older HP/Agilent supply they used most of that pie chart on the Voltage/Current regulation design and put in a crap load of money testing those designs under all sorts of conditions. The rest of the money was used on making a solid exterior. On top of that your talking about a $800 unit in early 1990's money.
Every time I look at a piece of gear from China I look at how many bells and whistles they have added and I try to subtract that from what I figure the cost price is and then calculate out how much money they must have spent on the core engine of the device.
To me the Core is what really matters, what’s the point of having a Precision Lab Power supply with 100 bells and whistles if it’s output is not really precise or reliable?
When I saw the DP832 I knew the core engine had to be made on a very low budget, the rotary encoder knob was the first indication that money was very tight and it only got worst as I saw more. I think if Dave was to look around further I think he would find that regulator is probably just one of many shortcuts they took to save money. I would bet good money that almost every part in that unit from the regulators to the Caps are all picked from the lowest bidder and very little margin is built into the overal design.
BTW it was nice to see the Fluke 87V were it belonged, front and center.
Great Video Dave.