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Fixing an Agilent 2000a/3000a Oscilloscope with Damaged Firmware NAND Flash
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It's a well-known fact that you can never have too many projects from eBay, as it helps stave off boredom. That’s exactly why [Anthony Kouttron] decided to snag an Agilent DSO-X 2014A digital oscilloscope listed as defective and not powering up, essentially buying it for spare parts. Upon receiving the device, [Anthony] discovered that this description was accurate; the front of the oscilloscope looked like it had been dragged across pavement and its knobs appeared to have been smashed with a hammer. Luckily, fixing the damaged encoder and plastic casing was straightforward. However, the oscilloscope still refused to boot when turned on. Just how extensive was the damage?
As Anthony explains in the article, problems with this series of Agilent DSOs are widely recognized. One such issue is the power supply unit (PSU) which tends to burn out the primary side because the soft power button keeps it on continuously without cooling. Another issue is the corrupted NAND storage, which he verified after decoding the UART interface on the PCB that uses an ST SPEAr600 ARM-based SoC. The error message indicating a failed flash block decompression from Windows CE was quite telling.
This prompted him to delve into locating the WinCE firmware images for this oscilloscope, which were removed by Keysight but are saved on his website, as well as the InfiniiVision scope application. The firmware is uploaded using the bootloader in binary YMODEM mode, and then InfiniiVision is installed using a USB drive. Another approach, detailed in the SPEAr600 datasheet, involves using USB BootROM, which can also be accessed through the bootloader with some additional work.
Regarding the reason behind the NAND corruption, it's believed that the system writes to the same portion of the NAND Flash during startup, and the documentation for the SPEAr600's Flash controller does not reference wear leveling. Regardless of the accuracy of this theory, it's possible to rectify the issue with some effort, without needing to replace the NAND Flash chip.
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