EEVblog #1023 - Rigol DL3021 Electronic Load Teardown

hi we're gonna take a look at Rygel's New Deal 30 21 or through Deal 3000 series electronic loads we love electronic loads here on the eevblog I've done like a do-it-yourself electronic load video which I'll link in at the end and down below which is incredibly popular people build their own but you can't beat a nice commercial electronic load for power supply testing battery discharge testing solar cell testing all that sort of jazz so let's take a look at it now this is the deal 30 21 it's actually the bottom Ranger unit 499 US dollars which puts it about in the middle of what the commercial electronic load market companies like kicker soui make sort of you know the top shelf electronic loads this is on par with like you BK Precision's and your arrays and ITEX and ones like that and then you've got your much cheaper ones you know name clone copy ones your may new O's or whatever they are on eBay and things like that so it's somewhere in between it's a 200 watt load 150 volts 40 amps now that don't confuse this with the deal 3021 IE on the end of it the a model is actually 300 bucks more 799 US dollars retail and what do you get well having a look at the datasheet I'm the manual for this thing and the specs I'm having a hard time finding the difference it seems to be the naught point 1 milliamp resolution read back current as opposed to 1 milliamps for the non a model but apart from that they're both point oh five percent class electronic loads which is what you expect in a precision DC electronic load in this price range 100 ppm they're all the same tempo it's got slightly different ranges on constant resistance modes and things like that but there's not much in it I don't understand why they make an a version it's just stupid just make the $499 a version with the a functionality extra whatever the hell that is it probably doesn't cost you anything at all might be like software options or something like that just don't just make one model thank you very much anyway this deals are the 30 31 as well once again a non a version it starts at 999 bucks so a thousand bucks goes up to 1500 bucks and the only difference in that is that 60 amps capable instead of 40 amps but it is 350 watts as opposed to this 200 watt model so anyway this 200 watt model good enough for say a larger solar panel testing things like that large battery packs stuff like that plenty capable for things like that now it's your traditional new Roy goal look and feel with these rubber bumpers on them you ever like them or you don't they're like man whatever okay we're got a large screen on will power it up a later because we want to tear it apart first and we've got one knob on the thing and keep a derangement your various functions in here and they've put the sense terminals on your front your binding poster USB on the front and you know in cursor keys whatnot in your various configures up the top it's a reasonable layout but just look at this thing the first time I saw this thing my head started like twitch to one side and I started to get a nervous tic because look at these bloody buttons here reverse italics buttons look at them look at them whoever designed that should be hung drawn and quartered it's ridiculous the italics sloping backwards and the buttons sloping backwards why next up I'm no graphic artists but what the hell is up with the fonts on this thing what is this function font look at like I I think I posted this on Twitter a photo of this I think somebody counted four maybe five different fonts used on this thing it's just insane the different fonts like why why who designed this they shouldn't be in the business it looks like someone's just throw it up the font list Illuminati confirmed what the hell is that what does that even mean it's not even labeled it's just creepy now I like the fact that they put the sets terminals on the front shrouded 4 millimeter banana plugs but I would have liked just the old-school screw terminals as well so and sorry but the binding posts are a complete and utter fail why do companies keep making that do these electronic loads they all seem to do it make ones with a no banana plug on them no hole inside the thread inside the shaft there so they can shove your wire securely in there they just have these ridiculous dumbass binding posts like this they're so frustrating um yeah you have to end up making your own little adapter to convert into what the hell you want but check this out this is kind of interesting you see the thread here I thought AHA that might be surface some optional adapter they actually include this plastic shroud in here which just has some cutouts at the bottom for your wires and that just sits on there they got maintenance on there and that just it just attaches in there the magnet over here is not great and then you can just screw that eventually like straight into there um fir like it's only 150 volt rated so it's designed for you know so you can't touch these things but like yeah I don't know okay cute I guess nice touch now as for the key layout it could certainly have been better I mean you've got all your constant current constant voltage constant resistance constant power and and your other looks like there's a pulse mode a toggle mode a list mode and stuff like that so I don't mind that you know your on/off button probably should have been down like here next to your output or something like that perhaps transient short is interesting I'm curious to find out what does it just short out the internal current shunt not sure what that is anyway you know your cursor keys the knob here is not possible and oh this the italics ones up there or so triggering Oh anyway it's okay but they could have done better and I like the dedicated application button here battery OCP and OPP I'm curious to check out the battery functionality for measuring your characteristic curves of batteries on the back made in China of course but look it's fun fully featured for the bottom of the range unit you've got some digital i/o for our program below our control switching and test fixtures off and on you've got your LXi LAN interface fantastic USB device or old-school rs-232 serial current monitor output and voltage monitor output very handy for a hooking those up to the scope nice alright so let's crack this thing open just take the handle off the side and the four feet on the bottom and slides off just like most others and we're in like Flynn jeez I'll have to sit it up for you but yeah hang on we'll take a squiz whoa I tell you what this looks quite neat and tidy I really like it we'll show you up close it's hard to sort of get in here without taking the whole blinking a lot about like get detail on the board and get light in there and stuff but I really quite liked it anyway thermal wise we've got our entry on the side here and here through the hole the grille on the side of the unit the fan inside then sucks the air from here pushes it through our fin heatsink which has all our power on there you can see those down in there there's some on the other side as well not even number so that's interesting and just dumps it out the back so the thermal design that's as good as you can expect and this is the 200 watt model so the upper model is the 350 watt model so presumably it either has some more power devices on there I can see some extra footprints down in there there we go it looks like it's going to have our the same heatsink and everything might drive the fan a bit quicker we've got some extra footprints down in there so maybe it's just a matter of extra power on the upgraded unit in that case why does it cost like four this one's $499 the other is a thousand bucks why does it cost five hundred bucks more double to get the extra power if all the heat sink in and everything else is like you know the rest of the design is going to be pretty much the same because it's 60 amps versus 40 amps like that's really gouging just make one model just make the 60 amp model for 499 bucks and you'd kill the market probably come on but okay it's got some extra power devices you know and I don't mind paying for and like an increased power model with extra parts but not double that's just no not on now this is absolutely fascinating look they've used a PCI expansion board in there for all of your our i/o capability that's really quite nice I like that nothing wrong with PCI slots there and you know readily available they're never going to go obsolete they're used in too many things there they're cheap they're simple they've got lots of contacts they're reliable they're proven everything else like it's nice to see a PC I bought it in there like that that's off ok our mains whirring I like the earth terminal going off there that looks are properly crimped and shake proof why should no worries that's all heat stroke goes onto the main PCB down here that's the mains voltage selection so they've been doing some main selection around there you can see the high voltage isolation there slots in there very nice and then they've got that wiring going over over there running through their cable tied nicely and that goes over to the reel clunking power switch on the front which is actually mounted on the main PC could be so once again that's quite like nice they've left the tons of our isolation space in there so no worries whatsoever rygel innovation or nothing is this a new slogan I don't think I've seen that before anyway designed in China they're quite proud of it and rightly so they're doing lots of nice R&D and that transformer looks nice they're nice and last small linear Joby because this is not a power supply it's a load so it doesn't have to power much it's just got a power all the a digital analog circuitry that's it so AC and bridge rectifier we've got our filter cap we've got a couple of small heat sinks here have to me I get the thermal camera on those I suspect because rygel have goofed up that in the past although be careful getting the thermal camera on - just the anodized clear aluminium like this because your emissivity readings will be crap so you're better off maybe getting a thermocouple on there to measure that but of course the test would be the old finger test leave it on for a while and it shouldn't change with the what load it's producing and stuff like that so as long as you can keep your finger on there it's under 50 degrees she'll be right no worries so that all looks fine and dandy you can see the high-voltage isolation cutouts there around the MOSFETs so yep they know what they're doing nice touch and the electrolytic cap that's simple there is a Sam Young so there Sam young kmg series you know me par for the course now for the main chip in there I'm surprised to see a Spartan 6 in something like this I mean they must be running like a soft core processor in there I would be I guess in to do all this you know they could do it all in VHDL or whatnot but yeah that my guess is is they're running some sort of a soft core processor in that but don't all the rest of it is just all the all the miscellaneous you know and logger doesn't you know it has the ADCs and the DAX and whatnot all around it but that's uh that's pretty much all she wrote but the interesting thing to know it is this ribbon cable here of course goes off to the front panel board that's got another octo FPGA we have a quick look at that but the traces don't go off to the spartan 6 look they bugger off all the way around here right behind the transformer and everything else they run in all the way around here coming right to the back and go into that PCI card which controls that so maybe the processor is actually on the front board and that FPGA is just doing all the you know the data acquisition stuff and things like that because because otherwise why would you have the i/o card there flowing into the front panel board so yeah I take that back the Spartan sixes it might still be run in a softcore but it's a it's not doing all the main processing and display stuff and can't quite read that on the screen but that's some sort of freescale a processor down in there is it holding the doing all the digital i/o stuff I can't actually get this PCI card out without actually taking out the mainboard it just does not come out our jutsu the d9 connector serial connector on the back bummer it's for the front panel board down in there and active Pro ASIC 3 here is that they've used a like an octal one and then a Spartan one as I links one so you know two separate brands they probably have different development teams working on these so they just chose their flavor of FPGA actually given that there's only the active Pro a 6-3 FPGA on their Spartan 6 down there I am going to say that that freescale processor down in there is the main processor for this thing and in fact they call this a digital board if you can see the text down in there so it's not just an i/o board this is the digital board so this is the digital processor board for the whole thing so that is the main processor kind of you know not a bad decision to put it onto a PCI card like that you can swap it out later without changing your main board that's you know and your display board as well that's quite smart now as for the input over here very very nice I love this and it's common that you'll find these on big loads like this the huge binding posts just huge bus bars directly out straight onto the PCB copper just massive pads massive amount of copper on the PCB there and it looks like we've only got the one current shunt resistor that one down there you might be able to mind if you get the macro lens on there but you might be able to see little tracers coming out there that's the that's the pair coming out for the 4-wire sense there we go should be able to see that just a couple of one pair coming out there that's just the sense wise going into the sense amp down there now you might be thinking hey this is a shut resistor that's a 4.7 ohm huge couple of what what is that the five what job' or something I don't know it's quite large power one and no that is not a current shunt resistor that is not a low ppm current shunt resistance don't have to be accurate as I've said many times before but they've got to have they've got to be very stable so they've got to have a low temperature coefficient this that looks like just a joe bloggs power resistor so that's just part of some a snubber RC snubber type network they're happening so looks like we've only got the one current shunt resistor down there very low value Joby now whether or not that varies between the regular model and the a model I doubt it I think they're using the same current sense resistor I like it well the sense network could change they could get extra resolution but I think it's just probably like a software type difference there so this is the difference between they would be getting the non a model which we've got here has one milliamp resolution I believe and the a model has not point one milli amps so you know order of magnitude better but they're probably still using the exact same current shunt resistor you power fanboys there you go international rectifier can't quite make out that number on the LCD but I'll read that back include the datasheet there probably are like matching devices in there all the way along so I've got it as I said it's difficult to get this board out so I'm not going to bother to see the other ones but each channel has six of those and presumably the a model with the 60 amp capability is going to have the extra two so I would have eight devices per side there's certainly being a bit how you're doing with the heat sink compound in there check that out geez so I'd like to go into more detail and trying to get that board out but it looks a little bit ugly I don't I don't think we're going to learn a huge amount more justify sit to say it suffice it to say that this thing is quite well design and manufactured I can't find any issues with this thing at all so up yeah I'm just excited to pair it up and have a little play with it not sure if you can see that but the buggers have lasered off the markings on these four so8 packages here around the current sensor stop it just stop it and they've done the same bloody thing for the op-amp around the MOSFETs there why ah unbelievable just see if we can see the other down in there not sure can't see it on the LCD and that connected down in there obviously going off to the sense wires on the front panel got a real a notice the isolation slot and also some input divider or and or protection resistors and once again more high voltage slots they're only 150 volts a you know you needn't do that sort of thing for those sorts of voltages but hey over voltage and stuff like that no worries but it does show nice attention to detail and more slots cut around here so yeah somebody just went yeah I put a slot in because that's the thing to do and I'm not sure what's going on with those plated holes input negative 1 2 3 4 like I don't get it because they're just one big copper pad with plated through holes um I don't know they're not like current shunt jumpers or anything like that for big current shunts obviously some sort of extra mechanical interface which they didn't use they went for the other two big bolts down there perhaps hmm all right so let's power this baby up and have a quick play around with that self-test or I go come on you can do it wonder what OS it's running come on it's only an electronic load self-test twiddle Farms twiddle thumbs and here we go we're in like Flynn now I don't mind the inner fire since I'm not too bad it all displays the current our voltage with four digit precision thank you very much and we do get even though this is not the IE model we do get the naught point one milli amps at least the display digit is there anyway so that is definitely not point 1 million sweather or not you know it could be as I said just a software thing and it just counts up in tens and only has one milliamp resolution I don't know but anyway I'm it displays our power and our resistance as well so that's put it in constant current mode so range is here we've got 40 amps and 4 amps so that doesn't give us it doesn't change our display resolution at all anyway so that's rather interesting our slew rate our V on where it does switches on at our voltage limit 180 volts it's 150 volt supplies so why it's 180 volts I don't know and a our constant current limit up to 70 amps once again this is only a 40 amp supply so what's going on there and by the way if I start using the knob there is no velocity control ah why it's not hard to implement a proper velocity control for that that's just ridiculous so I can just type in one like that and there you go and I've got a press like one amp there it is but like give me a velocity control it doesn't work on any of the input parameters at all so on constant voltage range we have our selectable 15 volts or 150 volt range that's all right no worries and our voltage once again the knob is almost useless it's only for fine control frustrating anyway and we can set our voltage limit and our current limit once again and our constant resistance range there you go anywhere from what which anywhere down to 2 ohms on the 15 K ohm range but it also has a 15 ohm range as well 15 AM range as well and our resistance can't go down to 80 millions their need and our constant power mode we don't have any ranges on that just fixed at the what level so let's actually enter 200 watts cuz that's our limit can we go above that no of course we can't boom nope uh-uh setting has exceeded the power upper limit thank you and we've got our other function modes here let's continuous config I'd I like this how it's all just coming up like that that is very comprehensive and pulse config I'd once again look at all the parameters you can set very nice read apply how do you okay we'll have to set those somewhere else presumably um toggle config guide and then you've got the list mode as well automatically goes into the graph here shows you all your relevant parameters in a quite decent font there and I'm liking this I really am it's quite neat anyway the list thing is like a a step based us sequence type mode you can go to useful for systemized power supply testing and things like that now what I really interested in is the battery mode and let's have a look once again voltage and current displayed milliamp hours watt hours which is what you know the true capacity of a battery our timer there but unfortunately we can set the current we can set our range from 4 amps or 40 amps we can set our stop voltage and set our current stop as well and now to or a timer based stop but we can't set a stop value on our watt hours why not it's just a software thing it can only do milliamp hours you can't stop on what hours like and that's where it'll switch on with the on voltage like just give me whatever 's anyway let's click the Illuminati button and see what that does oh that's our graph that's our graph you can start let's see it's starting to accumulate there so the unlabeled Illuminati button some people say I put this on Twitter and they said Isis CBS logo like I have no idea about see yes so yeah whatever it's the Illuminati button and yeah we've got our graph mode so that means that in when you're in say constant current mode you can do the graph so it's totally dependent upon constant power depending on which major in I don't mind that I could have plenty labeled no in the over modes is our over current our protection mode you can just ask sequence like do a step sequence mode for testing now your supplies for power and current so that's not bad at all I like those three apps built-in and it looks like our on off button there it is load just comes up trent up presumably transient and what a short do does it short out the terminals i don't know what short does are CFM the most annoying part about this though is that i cannot select anything but constant current discharge I mean what if I want to test constant constant resistance mode which is in the data sheets for our you know toy testing and things like that I can't do it I've got constant current only it's ridiculous this is like just a software limitation why have a complete battery mode like this if that's all you're gonna be able to do it's ridiculous now for the finger test on these heat sinks down in here of course this one's where we're not dumping any load into this at all so of course that's completely cold these linear rigs down here back of the finger hang on it is Rygel so died yay yay yeah let's to hot to touch unbelievable have they done it again okay so that one there is eighty degrees come on this is not a rocket science Rygel that is too hot for a simple linear supply I mean like the junction temperature has like is well above that that's just that like granted okay we don't have the top in the case so we're like I can sort of put the case back I can well I can put something on the top and that's going to simulate the airflow let me do that but that's just that's just wrong I'm afraid that the one next to it there is even worse this one's up to 88 ah unbelievable okay I've put the lid on the top and you can see it going down it's droppin I've got like just boxes on the top like that just to simulate cuz the air in the side of the intakes gonna be the same okay it's getting down towards 75 degrees so yeah that's knocking like 13 degrees off but that is still just no excuse for being that high for a basic linear regulator when you have all that space inside it's just insane now and that's not to say that it's like you know going to fail or anything like that there's still margin inside you know the dire temperature of a 7805 or whatever can go up to what is it 120 degrees Celsius or something but there so it's not gonna fire it I don't recall that being a nearly as bad as I think it was over a hundred degrees for the for the DP 832 power supply which they had to fix but come on no no no no no no now curiously the Roy Goldy p83 two powers up much much quicker than the electronic load why they have judge I can't remember the teardown but they've changed our processes or whatnot and maybe changed OS I don't know what's going on but there's a huge difference I mean that's fine this one takes forever but me whatever now I've got it hooked up to the a3 2 I've got simple constant current load of 1 amp we're getting one point double o4 over here and we're getting point 9 9 7 8 that's like a discrepancy of 0.6% between them um what the that's way out of spec Oh dole I'm on the 40 amp range let's get up what turn off the load you can't change ranges unless you I have the load turned off there we go for ramp range no it's exactly the same like assuming that let's just assume that it's one amp that's like 0.3% out point two percent out it's supposed to be 0.05 percent plus 0.05 percent full-scale it seems out of spec and let's just check the voltage twenty nine point nine seven seven and right on the terminals where it should be measuring at twenty nine point nine eight while it's not too far off but technically that might be close to or out of spec as well okay people wanted to know the current well it looks like the DPA three two is bang-on one point double O five I'm not going to quibble one least significant digit compared to the seven and a half digit key side here so we're gonna take that as absolute because yeah its accuracy is like order of magnitude better or something than what we've got here and we're getting point nine nine eight one that's out of spec Rago please explain okay let's do our dreaded constant resistance mode we've got to set to our ten ohms let's switch on our supply here and absolutely nothing I switched it down to 2 ohms we're getting no hiccup in at all even though you can see that the 3 amp current limit is enabled on the DPA 3 - nothing's hiccup in no stable s and the short button does exactly what you expect it shorts it out point 0 1 ohms so it doesn't do that with a relay it does that using the inner using the MOSFET load to actually do that now as for the graph functionality on this thing the illuminati mode it's there's no way like you can't like there's no auto scale button or anything like that - just like auto scale that in that would have been really nice please implement something like that just so that you can see the find tail in there and we can choose our data current U is voltage our as resistance P is power why can't we do the voltage and current on the same graph why can't we have another y-axis over here and do them in different colors yeah please that'll be nice and I plugged in my USB stick here it says it was detected and I'm gonna print save an image great I love that feature it's presumably hopefully but why failed why [Music] okay let's try another USB stick maybe it wasn't the right format or capacity or whatnot saving image come on unbelievable hey check this out I was just log in here I press the utility button it switches off the bloody output look why that's ridiculous well yes it does the same thing it doesn't do it for option but it doesn't forced or you push the bloody store button and it's there anyway look it looks like there's a D Drive there I presume that cow data is that the C is probably internal how do we get to D like that is a D Drive there save I don't know okay whatever what what okay I don't know so we have to do D do we have to select D before we did the bloody print thing is that what's going on here how do you get rid of that oh wow it's just ah yeah on okay print saving image it's gonna work this stuff failed yeh I think I finally found a USB stick that actually worked it just says saving image and saving oh goodness yeah and it saves it in bitmap form Houck wait okay let's go into the utility here have a look at the all the interface stuff at GPIB nice USB rs-232 nice or the requisite stuff and LXi land as well that's I'm sure that'll work a treat and there's the firmware versions and stuff for those playing along at home our system boot time times we've been booted 34 times FPGA version all the requisite stuff last calibrated first to the ninth and yep you betcha we've got software options land official digital i/o high resolution official like I guess that the a version have I been upgraded I don't know slew rate and frequency because they those three things the high resolution slow rate and frequency seem to have been the major differentiate errs with the a version so I don't know have I been given the AE version and no sticker on it um install I didn't so maybe I have now I don't mind the list mode here it actually works quite good basically you set the number of steps that you want is six maximum I'm not sure anyway what can we go up to night heaps so anyway we can set it back to two so we'll go to steps and then I've set I you just used cursor keys over here just to set okay we want one amp we're in constant current mode we can change our range so we won't want it one amp for a duration of one second and then we want to ants for a duration of one second and circles I loop you know how many times you want to loop through so we can now run that and it should hopefully nope what's it doing oh well why isn't it going under the next step hello McFly one other thing I noticed if you've actually got this on and you go to something else it just it'll go to that mode and switch it off you shouldn't be able to do that that's just wrong you should you know it should tell you sorry you know you've got to switch it off because she usually when you switch it on you're doing something you don't want to accidentally hit buttons and cause it to goof up now it looks like why this isn't working may the trigger it needs the trigger to go to each state it doesn't automatically do it based on the duration you can do trends transient I'm not sure what's going on there bus bus triggering is that like your interfaces your rs-232 s and land and whatnot all your digital i/o interface we can feed in an external signal cause at the step through but there's no like time-based mode or automatic or anything like that so that when we start this it just stays in the same duration there and it's one second it doesn't automatically go to the next so not sure what's going on there Artie if M maybe aha Tran Tran button let's go there we go let's press it yes there we go it's sequencing in through there you go you can see it sequencing through green on each oh no sorry cuz it only cycled through huh twice we only had number two circles but there you go you saw it you can see construe nice and you can apparently are record that to USB as well so if I go back well no I just pressed on and then trans and boom boom boom boom boom boom and it should end and it ended the recording did it let's see what we got well that's lame all it did was record the voltage why can't it record all the parameters here for each step that's just just dumb ok I'm going to do a battery discharge test I've got a Duracell la ultra in there fresh out of the pack you can see I'm using the our external sense lines here I've just got it hacked in there a bit how are you doing and I'm gonna do a very brutal one amp constant current discharge because you can't do anything else you can't do constant resistance or anything bloody ridiculous anyway I've got the stop voltage set to nought point eight volts I don't care about the time out I don't care the current time out I don't care about stopping point 5 volts turn on everything's hunky-dory it doesn't matter whether or not I go out of battery mode it shows us mucking around just with one before just to make sure the setup works and it shows the previous info there it doesn't clear it even if I go in there and you know change the change the up or whatever look anyway let's do it let's start at shall we so here we go a constant current discharge one amp and we should presumably these will clear the time will reset and we'll start again let's give it a bill there we go all right oh it's dropping dropping fairly drastically already as you'd expect because it's pretty brutal one amp on a poor innocent triple-a cell but anyway it will eventually get a figure here now we can actually call up the graph okay look there it is right it'll start but we can't choose both like we can't get the figure like it's just like a we're like why can't I have all the information on here and it resets the graph what the hell is going on here like I can't do both that is just ridiculous and we're done that didn't take long at all battery test completed I assume I press ok to get rid of that and there it is of course that the load is disconnected as so the voltage is actually recovering it would have gone down to not point eight volts on the terminals of the battery because we are doing the voltage since down here and there you go for the record 263 milliamp hours or 0.268 watt hours for a 1 amp discharge on a basically one of the best doublea's you can get the Juris cell ultra so yeah it's not great because triple a's aren't designed to handle one amp constant current loads that's just crazy you know and you'd use a triple-a or higher for something like that but there you go it works but yeah it's it's crude and look it's going to our graph where's our graph where's our data like it's just ridiculous record and dumped it to the USB stick damn it USB was not detected we've got a press record okay but to record like this I've got to be in the Illuminati mode right so I've got like I don't know back can I like if I go out of there is it oh no it's still in record so maybe that actually works maybe that is going to work here we go I'll start it again bingo there's a bit more capacity left in there battery of course Juna the electrochemistry recovery in there Judith a very steep discharge but hopefully we're actually dumping that to the USB stick so that'll be done in short order we'll only get another few tens of million powers out of that puppy surely okay we're done didn't take long at all we got an extra twenty three milliamp hours out of that there you go and once again it's recovering and presumably if we go back to its record in like I don't know do I just take the USB stick out like do i press unruhe cord what do I do like I don't I think it's only going to record I'd be very surprised if it actually recorded this data well I think I'm going to call it quits on having a play around with this thing for now this was not designed to be a for reviewers just to tear down an initial play around and the kind of initial verdict is like like I don't mind the design and build of it apart from that ridiculously hot one not as ridiculously hot a 3d p83 to that heatsink inside there I anyway the design of the front panel isn't the best those fonts are ridiculous but at the end of the day that doesn't really matter it's about the functionality of it I was disappointed by the battery mode some of the other modes are you know and like it has all your basic load functionality it would take by the way a lot of work to extensively test all the different modes of a advanced electronic load like this one so yeah that would like be a forty minute video in its own right think if I did that but there's like just basic things missing from the battery test their display mode and stuff the USB was it has to be a certain format and it didn't even tell me that it was wrong and it's just there appears to be accuracy issues with this thing maybe more extensive requirements on that you know I'm like it's only an amp it's not like a 40 amps or whatever it was like it it should have been better than that so I don't know what's going on there why go need to look at that and I don't know there's just not a huge amount of spit and polish on this thing it's like yeah okay it's a load it'll do the basic job but there seems to be you know quite a few issues with it which they can fix in firmware updates and stuff like that but initial impressions are that it's just a run-of-the-mill electronic load really um you know being per buck there are better ones just you know if you just want a basic electronic load you can get one for two 300 bucks on eBay one of those ripoff brands and they do more than an adequate job just for a basic electronic load for testing power supplies or something like that so at the end of the day it's like nothing hugely to recommend this thing yet it you know if it they improve the functionality and solve the whatever accuracy issues it might have and if they gave you the a model all of it like I don't I presume that mine has the extra a functionality but it doesn't have the label on there but those options are a ridiculous price like what was it four hundred bucks or was it double or something just to get the a model it's crazy just have one freaking model or maybe two if you want their difference between the 300 watt and the 200 watt model fine but like it doesn't justify the price difference so no they haven't got themselves a killer electronic load here I'm afraid it's just me another electronic load on the market they've all got their own little quirks and issues and whatnot and this one is no exception so there you go if you like this look at the row goal a deal or 3021 please give big thumbs up full of frame thumbs up and if you want to discuss it down below catch you next time you

Channel: EEVblog

Views: 109,556

Rating: 4.8478165 out of 5

Keywords: eevblog, video, rigol dl3000, rigol, rigol electronic load, electronic load, rigol dl3021, dl3021, dl3021a, dl3031, dl3031a, teardown, review

Id: Tk_3rYKWIIg

Length: 45min 20sec (2720 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 17 2017