Atten ADS 1102CAL oscilloscope

 

Just though I’d make a quick post about the inexpensive scope I picked up last year before I started working on multicopters.  Sadly I don’t have any new information to add, but I’ll summarize my findings and provide some (hopefully) useful links below.

ADS1102CAL[1]

I was searching for a small digital scope for general purpose use so I wouldn’t have to keep hauling around and firing up my Tek 585A. I wasn’t real picky on specs, so long as it was comfortable up to a few MHz, and had support for USB interface with a PC.

Long story short, I ended up with an Atten ADS 1102CAL, which shares its hardware with the Siglent SDS 1102CNL. This is good news, since Siglent is a slightly more reputable company, and they also release firmware updates for their scopes (more on that later).

For a detailed review on the scope, check here (CML version with more memory) or here (siglent version).  There’s also a hardware teardown posted here.

There are lots of pages online complaining about bugs in this scope, but most of them are on older firmware.  Sadly, atten doesn’t offer firmware updates, and the only way to get the newest firmware for this hardware seems to be to install the Siglent firmware.  Details here.  I haven’t done this yet, but I’ll update this post after I try it.

For linux users, I also found a program called attenload which allows user to pull screenshots and data from the scope similar to the windows software that atten provided.