As to this: get a fine enough Dremel tool, attach new wires to the internal die to pin connections, hold it down with epoxy, then I can solder it back on. I suppose it helps having it off the board now.

Due to the chip shortage these things have more than tripled in price (as did a lot of things)

Hello World

Oh man, that's going to take some time to explore all that.

I put the rabbit hole that is the FTDI aside for now and entered a different one instead. Talking to my scope.

The documentation is the finest chinglish. They are trying to say it's a Ones' complement.

So after lots of digging I found something. This is what Siglent considers sufficient documentation for this data field.
It is part of a function called main_desc() meant to parse the data. However, there is an offset of 0x16 on the data coming from the device. Look what Siglent's engineer wrote here:

recv = sds.read_raw()[16:]
vdiv,ofst,interval,trdl,tdiv = main_desc(recv)

Yep, an offset of 16 bytes or 0x10! Of course all values came out as hot garbage. Jesus.

The engineering man hours that go into deciphering this garbage are probably worth more than buying a proper scope, like a Keysight. Too bad I'm not being paid.

It's 5pm, time for breakfast. Haven't eaten anything all day. The only thing I consumed was coffee, lol.

Actually, forget eating. Who needs food anyway? I pulled this thing out of the uni ewaste bin and never tried it out. Guess it's time.

After compiling and installing kernel modules and libraries from outside my repository (that's always fun), I get this.


Here is all the stuff needed:
https://gist.github.com/ochococo/8362414fff28fa593bc8f368ba94d46a#file-ni_gpib-usb-hs_pyvisa_ubuntu-md

https://github.com/fmhess/linux_gpib_firmware

When talking to this thing.

So a quick summary: The scope recognizes it's being talked to and I can see it on the PC side. However, I do not know which commands this even supports. This is probably pre SCPI standardization. I also do not know if the GPIB to USB adapter nor if the GPIB functionality of the scope work. So far I have not gotten it to react to any command or send any data to the PC.

I suppose this has to wait for now. Need to try with a different GPIB interface and maybe tap into it with the logic probes.

It works!!