Thank you. I couldn't face reading 60 pages. I'd mostly dropped out by page 20 or 30 as I did not have a programmer or blue pill. But I do now.
I got a replacement panel with V 3.1, but not by "sweet talk". But at least 4 others did not. I'd like to help them. In a classic twist of irony I got a front panel after I had purchased a Keysight 33622A from the Keysight eBay store.
I offered to do a review of the FY6600 against the 33622A and attached some 8560A spectrum analyzer plots. But that did not result in the other 4 members with 3.0 units getting relief. Nor did a 2nd less friendly approach. So it's time for me to carry through with what I said I'd do if they did not supply new FPs to the other 4. It will likely prove *far* more expensive than sending out 4 FPs.
If we have the bus protocol worked out I ought to be able to write the front end UI part. It would be a good warm up exercise for writing FOSS DSO FW for Zynq based scopes (e.g. the Instek 2000E and the Siglent 1000X-E). And a pleasant diversion from reverse engineering the DSOs which are rather more complex.
I've sent a PM to fremen67. My concern was that it might have already been done.
Subsequent to my V 3.0 adventure I bought a very nice set of bench gear, mostly early 90's HP gear. I'm 65 and finally gave myself permission to spend the money. But I have many painful memories of when I couldn't afford test gear. My first good scope was a Dumont 1060, a very nice dual trace analog scope which I bought from Tucker Electronics in 1991 for $325 with a 30 day warranty. The horizontal sweep died about day 35. Eventually I traded a couple of spare 144 MB ESDI drives for a wonky 465 which worked well enough to let me fix the Dumont which then let me fix the 465.
After that moves and the turmoil of life left me without a bench setup. I was starting to rebuild a bench as all my other gear has died of old age and will require repairs. But I was still in the penny pinching mode I was taught growing up so Rigol DSO, F***Tech AWG, Tenma 4.5 digit DMM etc. But several friends dying and in particular watching my brother in-law deteriorate from Parkinson's dramatically over 9 months changed my attitude. Though my goals are still the same, good quality low cost T&M gear.
Glad to oblige, I'm probably the only member who's read the whole 69 pages (now 70 thanks to my recent efforts) within the past fortnight or so who could answer your question off the top of their head.
So you did manage to get a replacement panel then. Pity about the other four members who've had to go without or use the PC control software work around. I'm interested in how you finally managed to get Feeltech to 'do the right thing' (or did they?). I can imagine the irony of fixing your cheap FY6600 after spending some $5K plus on an all singing all dancing Keysight AWG.
Curiosity got the better of me and I found a review of the 33622A. I was rather surprised at just how small it was (not all that much bigger than the FY6600 as far as I could make out from the pictures). Obviously better made and a significantly more substantial piece of kit but quite bijou just the same.
I can quite understand the appeal of Feeltech's "Poor Man's 33622A" with its order of magnitude lesser specification at around a two orders of magnitude cheaper price point aimed at cash strapped hobbyists who can work around the lack of the refinements of a 5 grand AWG. I think Feeltech know their market demographic far far better than it knows itself.
If I had to describe Feeltech's marketing strategy using a simple to understand comparison, I'd say they're rather like a realtor (estate agent) specialising in fixer upper (run down) properties located amongst prime housing stock (up market areas), where the idea is not to waste money bringing the property up to the standard of its surroundings, an investment you'll have difficulty in recovering because you've excluded the wider market demographic, but to leave it open to a wider market of first time buyers trying to get on the property ladder who can see it as a low price ticket into an upmarket area.
It's just a pity that they don't quite understand the value of good customer relations (in particular the notion of 'Good Faith' and the concept of 'Good Will'). Whatever you have in mind to effect an attitude adjustment at Feeltech, I wish you all the best success.
It's not exactly clear but I assume your offer to review the FY6600 against the 33622A was to Feeltech rather than Keysight (the other way round wouldn't make much sense imo - Keysight, I imagine, would regard such a comparison as an insult, and one which would dent their sales figures). If Feeltech didn't jump at the chance of such a comparative review, they've either not got a customer relations/marketing department or else one that's totally oblivious to the value of such a priceless PR/marketing exercise.
Interesting that you still want to write a UI from scratch for that FY6600 in spite of what's gone on and after all this time. I'm guessing, in part at least, that you're trying to spite Feeltech for their lack of support. I do hope you succeed in this FOSS project.
However, you do realise that this will benefit Feeltech more than it will you since it will expand its appeal as a poor man's Keysight AWG even more. Still, a challenge is a challenge I suppose (and those four luckless members will no doubt offer profuse thanks for your efforts). Remember what I said about Feeltech knowing us better than we know ourselves? Well, I rest my case.
With regard to treating ourselves after a lifetime's frugality, I understand totally. Witness my blowing a whole £365 on a brand new SDS1202X-E DSO just the week before I then blew a whole £75.66 on that Feeltech AWG. Spending that sort of cash on test gear was something I'd have never dreamed of doing before. It's a whole new ball game now!
I'm now in my late 60s (I have to recalculate my age from the current year just to keep track - the novelty of birthday celebrations wore off decades ago) and it's finally dawned on me that I might as well "spend the children's inheritance" on myself rather than let them squander it on smart phones, smart TVs and other such trash - they're all well enough off to manage from just the sale of the house as 'our final parting gift' once the missus and I have popped our clogs.
Like you, I want good/serviceable quality T&M gear at the less than obscene, eye wateringly high prices still surprisingly being commanded by the Likes of Tektronix and Keysight. I enjoyed your tale of using a wonky 465 to repair that Dumont scope in order to fix up the 465. It reminds me of the sort of things I used to do and it demonstrates that perfection in T&M gear isn't as important as knowledge and experience and a proper understanding of the limitations of the less than perfect test gear you already possess or can aspire to.
As if to demonstrate that principle of "boot strapping" a repair using 'damaged goods' (and getting back on to the topic of improving my FY6600), I've been observing a rather curious variation in the wattage readings of the AWG's power consumption which I suspect may be due to one or more of the smoothing caps in its PSU board.
The readings during the past few days since I fitted the cooling fan have varied from just over the 9 watt mark to a gnat's dick short of the 10 watt mark on the mirror backed 100W scale on my Metrawatt analogue wattmeter (around a 6 to 7 percent variation).
Switching PSUs don't respond to mains voltage variations in the way that analogue PSUs do. Indeed, I wouldn't expect to be able to observe any variation whatsoever even if it varied between 200 and 265 volts, let alone the typical 239 to 246 volts we experience at this location, so I know that it has to be caused by changes taking place inside the box.
Since I've got the AWG set up for 20MHz 20vp2p driving 50 ohm loads with my DSO hooked up in order to monitor the output and nothing has changed this configuration during all the time I've been monitoring the power consumption, my number one suspect is the PSU board with the main board and front panel as secondary suspects (I can't completely rule them out) and caps are the most likely culprit for such subtle strangeness in smpsu behaviour - I've got to make a start somewhere.
I've built up a nice little collection of fine looking caps salvaged from scrapped MoBos over the years but, despite having no comebacks from repairs to PC MoBos using such recovered caps, there's still the possibility of the odd one or two bad ones hiding amongst all the good so I do need to test my most suitable candidate replacement caps to avoid my repair attempt making things worse.
It's rather lucky then that I happen to have a 'scope and a sig gen on hand to perform some basic ESR tests to weed out any duds from my collection of salvaged capacitors before I use them to 'improve' the PSU board.
If I'd had another sig genny to hand, I could've tested the caps in situ and perhaps avoid swapping them out for testing later but, as it happens, I don't, so the job has to be done this way.
You may well ask why I don't suspect the last item I'd added as extra loading on the PSU and the answer is that the fan has never faltered and when I do stall it to see whether it has any effect on the wattage reading, all I can observe is a barely perceptable increase of no more than a quarter at most of the slow variation I've witnessed so far (plus, I've had a notion that it had been doing this even before I added the fan). If a cap change makes no difference, then I'll have to test the PSU board with a resistor dummy load before I can cast my suspicions further afield.
There's even an outside chance that this might be 'normal behaviour' for this AWG unlikely as that seems (it's Feeltech, so who knows what's possible?). However, I can't imagine too many of Feeltech's customer demographic will even have an analogue wattmeter or an expensive bench wattmeter capable of measuring in increments of 10mW or better in order to observe such subtle power consumption behaviour (analogue wattmeters are rarer than unicorn droppings as of over a decade ago), so I don't expect anyone here to pipe up with a similar observation even if they wanted to test for it with their "Kill-A-Watt meters" since a digital readout to one tenth of a watt accuracy will make such subtle variations quite hard to distinguish from the "dance of the digits" typically performed by such plug in energy consumption meters.
Still 'n' all, if anyone is intrigued enough to try and repeat my observations, what I've observed has been a slow variation between, in my specific setup, just over the 9 watt mark increasing slowly and, as far as I could ascertain, smoothly to just short of the ten watt mark over a period of an hour or more with no sudden jumps before going the other way after perhaps an hour or so at the 9.9 watt level. I'd estimate a variation of around 750mW, roughly a 7% variation on a nominal 9.5W load. It's only a small variation but I can't see any obvious reason why such a variation should exist at all.
Clutching at straws, assuming the FPGA comprises mostly of NMOS logic rather than CMOS, it's just possible that the average current consumption might be being modulated by the processing of a 20MHz sine wave at the 20vp2p level setting but I've not been able to find sufficient detail about the gate technology actually used in a modern day FPGA so that's just an educated guess with no hard evidence to support such a hypothesis. With any luck, a recapping of the PSU board may solve this riddle anyway.
Regards, Johnny B Good