codenaschen.de » December 2011 » Rigol Homebrew 4 All
Rigol Homebrew 4 All
Hi People !
Some time ago, I managed it to start my own software on a Rigol scope. I wrote some lines of code and manually patched the firmware at the right place to start it at the right time. It was hard and time-consuming to develop software in this way, because you have to flash the firmware again and again and again until it works as it should. The fear that your next manual manipulated firmware update will brick your device was always there.
This can't be the way for the masses, either for a big open source community...
To solve this problem, I developed a toolchain that makes it possible to build your own software, link it against the installed firmware, upload and start it in the normal operation of the oscilloscope. Its just need one time to flash a patched firmware that enhances the serial interfaces with some read/write and call functions.
I started a wiki to collect all the work thats done on the Rigol devices with focus to reverse engineering and homebrew programming. You will find it at http://rigolwiki.codenaschen.de. There is the source code of the toolchain and some little installation howto's.
To show you a little example of what's actually possible with the toolchain, I recorded this little video...