Disassembling a Ten-Year-Old Marvel: Miniware DS203 Mini Oscilloscope

Miniware’s DS203 is one of the earlier mini oscilloscopes in China, followed by others like ZYBO and DreamSource.

I bought this DS203 in 2014, and it is already 10 years old… Let’s open it up and appreciate the internal materials.

The entire body is made of aluminum alloy CNC, with four hex screws at the back, which can be opened with Miniware’s screwdriver.

The battery is of specification 403860, 950mAh, which can last for several hours without issue.

The exquisite front shell is entirely CNC, and the screen protector is made of glass.

A large metal plate is used for isolation on the circuit board.

The screen is a 3-inch LCD, and the black component on the right is a very small packaged buzzer.

You can see that the back shielding shell is soldered, so let’s remove it with a soldering iron.

The three pads come off easily.

Here’s a full view of the chip. This is one of the few mini oscilloscope solutions that use FPGA and ADC chips, which sets it apart from pure toys. (Of course, it can’t compare to professional ones; they are not in the same category of products.)

There are two analog input channels, each with a CPC1017N solid-state relay for range switching, followed by a row of adjustable capacitors.

HC4052 analog switch

This 48-pin chip is a dual-channel high-speed ADC chip, which should be the ADI AD9288, but this one is likely a domestic version, as indicated in the schematic later.

The digital signals converted from the ADC are captured and encoded by the LATTICE ICE40HX4K FPGA, which is the basic structure of most oscilloscopes.

Next is the STM32F103, a general-purpose MCU for screen display and interaction tasks.

This ADC has poor printing quality, but it is likely a domestic product.

Here’s a family photo.

This oscilloscope has accompanied me for 10 years, and it is still alive. Although I don’t use it much anymore, it doesn’t change the fact that it was the best palm-sized mini oscilloscope back in the day. Moreover, at that time, some netizens developed third-party firmware that supported functions like logic analyzer, signal output, and app switching.

Finally, here’s its schematic diagram.

Author: Breadboard CommunityBlog Author JustDo

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Disassembling a Ten-Year-Old Marvel: Miniware DS203 Mini Oscilloscope

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