Author Topic: OWON TAO3104 Tablet Oscilloscope (Read 1001 times)

Thedon · « **on:** December 27, 2021, 05:24:23 am »

Hello everyone,

I recently purchased a OWON TAO3104 tablet oscilloscope as I required a portable oscilloscope and was shopping for a handheld oscilloscope deciding to get a TAO3104 as it was reasonably priced considering bandwidth and 4 channels.
The TAO3104 has the following main specs;
BW   100MHz
Sample rate   1GS/s
Record length   40M
Wave-forms   45000wfms/s
Channels   4
Bus decoding   I2C, SPI, UART(RS232), CAN
And a number of other features. So, I decided to do a tear down and review the first photos are the internals noticing the FPGA is a Spartan XC6SLX45, the channel BNC connectors outer shells are plastic and the battery is fairly large capacity (8000mAh). The other chips identified were AM3352BZCZD60, 29FIG08ABAEA, HSTQ1G & 2G memory and HAD1511 ADC.

I didn’t remove the tin cans to have a look at the channel inputs as this would have required a lot of de-soldering so will leave that for somebody else sorry.

The back cover has a heat sink and fan for the FPGA and the other processor. To remove the back cover, they designed the rubber boot to unclip from the cover I think over time this will result in tearing of the boot due to wear and tear.

I checked each input using the calibration test point there were no noticeable differences between any of the channels and I checked the BW to verify that it was accurate as stated (120MHz). I measured 119MHz fairly close to what is stated and seen on the first screen shot. The next screen shot is a 10KHz square wave with FFT analysis the FFT is 50MHz span which is the max span this severely limits the usefulness of the FFT function. The last screen shot shows a colour video raster at line rate I found the video triggering functions quite useful for this unit. I tried testing the serial decoding specifically SPI bus data but could only decode the bus signal when in stop mode rather than single mode so didn’t record any screen captures, I’m probably not setting it up correctly. Overall, I’m happy with this unit for $777 AUD from Aliexpress I don’t think it was a bad buy it won’t replace my bench oscilloscope MSO-X-2012 but didn’t intend to replace it just wanted a handheld unit. Some complaints are the rubber boot which I already mentioned including the flap that covers all the ports on the side. Only able to move the cursors using the touchscreen I prefer using the knobs, The touchscreen is quite good there is a slight delay when using it and finally the stand although it’s sturdy I just don’t like the design my preference would have been a stand integrated within the case.