Tektronix 224 Oscilloscope Repair and Modification

hi there and welcome to mr. Carlson's lab in this episode I'm going to take a small Tektronix oscilloscope and do a battery upgrade so basically what I'm going to do is get rid of the long since dead let acid battery and replace it with something a little bit more modern and by doing this I'll get a little bit more operating time out of the oscilloscope as well so let's get started so here's how the story goes I'm browsing around online and I run across this tech 224 oscilloscope not thinking too much of it at the time right it's a cute little old digital oscilloscope really is what it is and you know I've seen the 2 2 2 before and yeah you know I'm thinking you know it's these scopes are long in the tooth but you know they are kind of cute right so I thought well you know I spotted this thing and I'm like you know what's that so I go back and I take a look at it on it's a tube a battery charger you can you know fit the factory lead acid batteries in here and plug them in and so I had some high-res photos so I clicked on the high-res photos and look at the bag wow that's almost you know absolutely mint you have the little scope out of the bag at the time and the scope looks absolutely flawless and now you know see the manual and the power pack and the probe sitting beside it and everything I'm thinking wow this is sure clean I'm just gonna call this guy the price was right you know it's a basically giving this thing away right so I call a fella up and he says yeah I bought this for an intended purpose and I think I used it five times he said and it's just really sat he says I'd like to see it go to a good home he says it's uh you know this pretty much collectors condition and I said well from the pictures I can definitely see that so would you mind if I come and take a look at the thingy so sure so I go and meet the fella and in person you know it looked better than in the photos I'm looking at this and the bag is just flawless everything is just looks like it came right out of the box and we'll take a look at the scope here in just a minute the probes are in the little side bag with the scope we'll take a look at that all here so you know as I say the price was right and I said well I can't leave this behind this is so cute well of course you know one hitch with buying a scope like this both the lead acid batteries are now unobtainium and they're unavailable now using something like this is if you want to really start looking at high frequencies this is a DC to 60 megahertz oscilloscope here alright but you know you start getting into the HF area and it's you know into the higher frequencies and it starts to play connect the dots right it's you know it's a slow digital oscilloscope so you know for in the field for just random stuff it's kind of cool to have around and you know it is a little bit of a conversation piece and you know the scope itself looks really really good so I picked the thing up and I figured well I'll try and retrofit some batteries into this thing and make it come back to life again it runs on the power pack alone but it would be nice to actually have it portable so what I'll do is in the next shot here I'll open up the bag and get all this stuff out of the way here and we'll take a look at the actual little oscilloscope so in order to get the scope out of this neat little carrying bag here is pretty simple just press this little button and it's right there they left a nice little hole on the top piercing get to this keypad and you know if you want to use the scope itself it just comes right out of the bag like that and that's the little oscilloscope so it has a little stand here you can put a little stand out if you want to use this thing on the bench you know you can just use it like so with a little power pack on the back you can see how small this thing is it really is pretty teeny of course I'm a sucker for any small oscilloscope with a CRT in it so the probes are in this bag here you just unzip this bag and there's two probes now the probes have got a really interesting connector they're not like a standard BNC style connector so one would have to create an adapter if you wanted to run a different you know probe on here but I'm not too worried about it because both of these things are just absolutely in pristine condition as he said he's used them about five times you can see that there's just absolutely no time on these probes usually you find you know finger goo and stuff on these probes and they're discolored right it's got that kind of a beige color to it and they're just absolutely spotless so the probes are in there and the battery is right behind this here and it's really easy to get out so what we'll do is I'll just zip this little case up here and in order to get at the battery you just slide this back so basically you go click like that and this comes out and there's the lead the battery inside it just makes connection to this connector here battery just comes out like so and you can just pull the connector off nice and easy and you have the batteries out so this here is the little compartment that I'm going to fit the new batteries into you can also see here if I grab that that charger I just move that out of the way I'll grab that you can see how that would you know just pop right into this charger charging Bay like that and then you just plug the battery itself right into this here and then I imagine you could probably use the stock charger on this I don't know if there was another you know power pack that this thing had that it didn't come with but I'm really not too concerned about it because when I put the batteries in here it's you know I'm not going to worry about this thing this is more just as part of the collection really at this point so these are little lead acid batteries and of course you know definitely not available anymore so in just a moment here we'll take a little closer look at this lead acid battery and I'll show you how I'm going to replace this with something a little bit more modern and a battery that has a little bit more capacity as well we'll put one together is what we're going to do so this is the factory battery that these Tektronix oscilloscopes come with and really what this thing is is it's two small lead acid batteries that they've glued together in the center here with hot glue now if you remember from my past tech tips Tuesday episodes I tell you how to release the hot glue from pretty much anything and I'll just fill you in briefly again all you do is use rubbing alcohol the 99% stuff and you know basically put it on the glue of course you got to be leery of the surface that you're putting alcohol on right but in this case I used the rubbing alcohol right on the surface here and you just move the hot glue around and in fact what I did is I pulled a little chunk of it away because there's a gap between the batteries and I put some right in there and just kind of sloshed it around a little bit and the stuff just pulls right off and you can separate these two batteries and there's also some neat information hiding underneath this Tektronix little badge here so after you get the glue off and you peel a sticker off this is really what's underneath it so there's two Panasonic for volt 2.1 amp hour batteries or a tunnel and today's speak at 2100 milliamp hours that seems to be how they like to word everything now and when these things are together they're like this in the package okay and they're glued together but I've just turned them around like this this is the top of both batteries here and what they do is they have both of these batteries in series so you get eight volts at 2.1 amp hours out of these two little lead acid batteries here now of course i want to replace these things i don't want to use a lead acid battery in here for you know many reasons they know if these things ever started to leak it would completely destroy that little oscilloscope right and i want something that has a little bit more capacity so these two batteries here you know the connections are relatively simple the two red wires on the connector here are just connected together here alright so they're just they run up here and then they're parallel together at the connection here and then the the black wire has got this there's it looks to be either an inductor or small resistor in here i'll have to open this up i'm curious to see what's in here but they're you know you know that they're using this as a fuse basically that's all that's going to be alright many companies do that they use small inductors as fuses very cheap fusing alright so again i want to replace this thing so i figured you know what can i do this with and you know and get a little bit more capacity out of it so what i did is i picked a bunch of these up right here and and some more of these things and you know some more of these things and i came up with all of this so basically what these are is these are 2500 milliamp power or if you want to look at it and you know 2.5 amp hours okay a batteries here so if i put two of these in parallel like this and two of these in parallel and two of these in parallel and two of these in parallel and all the way along alright so i'm just joining these together and then i hook these all in series i'll get around nine or over nine volts a little bit one fully charged out of all of these things and i'm going to have five amp hour capacity out of this I'm freaking this has got to be pretty good you know there's no acid to leak out of these things they'll fit in there now these are you know of course they're rechargeable nickel metal hydride batteries and yeah they're pricey in fact the price of all of these batteries is almost more than I paid for the entire oscilloscope but hey the Scopes cool and it would be nice to have the thing running and be able to use it you know in a portable situation so these batteries will last a very very long time these newer nickel metal hydride batteries they discharge very very slowly all you know inherently I guess you could say they kind of bleed their own charge off after a while but these are really good batteries these things they they last a long long time and they hold the charge for a very very long time in fact these things came pre-charged in the package and I just talked them up in the charger before I'm going to actually put all these things together so they're all completely they're fully charged right now and ready for me to join together and then of course when I put them in the scope it should work pretty much right away so what I'm going to do is start connecting these batteries together and next I'll show you exactly how I'm going to do that the first thing I'm going to do is put these batteries together basically I just want to stick these things together and that makes it easier for me to work on these things very easy way to do that is use super glue they got to be really quick with this because when you touch these things together and they're super glue on them that's it they are together so you want a flat surface and you want to make sure that you know you're not going to glue them together like this you want to make sure that you come in true so that they're matched at the top and at the bottom so what I do is I take my super glue and I just put a strip of it down the side here like this okay now I have to be really really quick when I'm doing this and I want to make sure that I come in absolutely straight and want the tops to be identical there they are now once you touch them together that's it that's all you got they're together they're solid if I was to try and pull these things apart right now it would pull the actual the shell off the battery so these things are just they're locked together at that point so what I'm going to do is do all seven of these like this I've done one other one like this already and I'll get these all put together now when I'm putting these things in series I don't want to have these things touching each other because they're going to be at a different potential so I'll use an insulator between all of these but I'll get into that here in just a little bit so what I'll do is I'll continue to glue all these together and I'll be back in my next step I've put insulating barriers between each of these sets of batteries now I understand that each battery itself has its own insulated coating on it if I was to glue these two together technically I'd have two insulated coatings glued together but if they were to split or something like that down the road there would be a chance that this body would touch this body of this battery here and I'd have a short-circuit condition so by having these little insulated cards between each of the pairs of batteries is just a little bit of added protection now you can see this is a solid glue block it's very very solid this would never come apart in an extreme situation if I needed to you know say break a pair of these off or split the pack I could do that by sticking a screwdriver in here but it would you know it's still extremely solid it's going to hold itself together quite nicely this big old dusty dirty transformer I've got here just act as a square it's got some weight to it and what I've done is I if you just picture these two batteries on the end here they're all glued together in pairs right so if you just picture these two batteries here what I would do is I would take them and push them up against this now these little insulated cards are the exact length of the shell of the battery excluding the cap here okay because I need to jump wires across I don't want them sticking way out so what I would do is I put the battery up against here and hold it up against here drop one of those cards down in there and then get the second set of batteries and align the bodies up get them nice and square put some superglue on it and hold it for just a moment and they're bonded just that fast then I would take you know the next set and work my way up like this and then once you get enough batteries on here you can actually use it as a square this way as well now again you got to be very quick if you're gluing these things together with these insulated cards between here you got to be very fast because the minute you touch them to get they're bonded so there really is no room for error there but it's a nice solid battery pack you can see it's nice and square each way and it's ready to be joined together and that's what I'll do in the next shot any upcoming segments of this video I'm going to be joining these batteries together in series parallel and I'm going to be doing that by soldering these batteries together now yes a lot of people frown on soldering batteries and yes you can frown on soldering batteries together if you don't know how to do it correctly but I've never had an issue myself if you are uncomfortable with soldering batteries together I strongly suggest that you don't do this if you're following along in this video you're doing so at your own risk so just take care so I'll briefly go over the technique of soldering batteries together it works really quite well and I've never had an issue to this day and I've been doing this for years and years and years so there's a whole bunch of things that are involved in doing this you need a really high heat gun and I'll be showing you that here in just a moment I have another video where I explain soldering batteries really quite in-depth and I'll just link that below the show more tab so just below this video you'll see a little show more tab if you click on that I'll start that video off right at that point in fact it's to do with another Tektronix oscilloscope as well so what I'm going to do is get all the tools ready here and I'll show you exactly how I'm going to join these things together before we go about trying to apply any solder to these batteries I definitely want to rough up the surfaces here just a little bit with some sandpaper so I'm going to have to do that to each battery here and the caps of these batteries as well so I'm going to be roughing up all of these surfaces here so once I've got that all done I'll be back with the soldering iron so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to solder a bridge across these two batteries here and have it ready to go to the next set there alright now I've left this straight and I'll explain that here in just a little bit now I've got some are a type flux here and that's going to help this solder quite a bit faster this rag here is soaked with water it's nice and cold and what I'm going to do is basically flash this with solder here very quickly all right and then once that's done I'm going to take this and touch this on here and cool that battery off extremely fast all right so what I'm going to do here is I'm first going to put just a little bit of solder on there I'll cool it off and then I'll tack it again just so I can hold this on here like this that'll allow me to work around in kind of a half circle here alright so this is the gun I'm using all right say to fit 200 260 watt D 550 iron with a piece of number 10 wire in the tip and I explained that in another video I can also link this tip video in down below as well that will also be below the show more tab here so the whole idea is to keep this quick and that's what I'm going to do so here I go see how fast that took solder and that's just cold to the touch i put my finger on it now i can see this being a lot easier on the battery then spot-welding I would think all right that's just this dead cold finger is sticking into the into the are a type flux there so that has flowed up quite nicely there all right so now I'm going to do a steady my hand here try and line this up the best that I can and I'm going to come in here and touch this again now the heat itself is actually right on the wire here it is nice and solid and dead cold well I would say it's just lightly lukewarm at this point here all right so now that I've got this wire on here at this point it's holding it kind of steady for me to do the rest of my work so basically I'm going to cut this off up here like so all right now you can see that there's a gap between this battery and this battery here I'm going to put a little insulator on just between that there so just grab some of my insulating pipe here all sorts of different sizes and this one looks like it'll work just fine so basically what I'm going to do is just measure that up cut a little piece of this off all right slide it down here like so all right and basically what this is going to do is just stop this from trying to touch this battery here and that's the only reason I have this between okay so now that that's on like that and I have it all sized up I can put another little drop of re flux here and I can come in with my iron really quick and solder this up and it takes just like that and as you can see not even lukewarm at this point so it works quite well and it's the same with these you have to be very careful with the caps on the tops of the battery here so now that I have this measured up like this I can get a pair of pliers all right and I can kind of align this to the center of the cap here okay so what I'm going to do is take a pair of pliers come in here and just bend this like this so I have a nice square Bend all right and now that I know what my lengths are going to be I can just cut this off and use this for something else probably on the other side all right now I want a bit of attention this is kind of springing up in order to put a little bit of tension between this all you have to do is just hold this down and Bend that up just a little bit and now there's tension on this on the caps of the batteries there so what I'm going to do is take a little bit of our a flux on there now this side here is a little bit more sensitive than doing the back side of the battery here because you don't want to melt that plastic there so I've got to be really quick with this and as you can see it works out quite well you can see the plastic is pulled away just a little bit from that but that's absolutely fine there's no issues with that whatsoever you can see the little vents and they're actually a little bit nicer this way you got to be very careful that you don't flow this down around the sides and actually plug those little vents that's very important so the next one will be this one here and I'll just go along so once I've done this here then I've got to join these ones all right and you know it just kind of works its way along here right so from here to here right you know all the way along I have to have these Allman series parallel so I got a bit of a job ahead of me and to sit here and watch me do this could be quite tedious so I'll just get this all done and I'll show you exactly what it looks like in the end the battery pack is now soldered together in series parallel you can see how I have these little insulating pieces of pipe here on the wire just between the batteries just in case it ever got pressed down it wouldn't short the two batteries out and that's on both sides here see here here and here as well so from this end here this is negative here and this is positive here let's take a look at the voltmeter and see what we've got all right so here we go negative here and positive here so nine point five nine volts so nine point six volts that's looking really really good so the next thing to do is to attach that little wiring harness so I can put the power from the batteries into the scope just before I go Sol during this wiring harness onto the battery pack here we wanted to see what was hiding under that little piece of heat shrink tubing and it turns out that it is an inductor so this is a 2.2 micro Henry inductor and now that I have the heat shrink removed here this negative lead is just a hair too short so I need it to be a boat oh just a few centimetres longer so what I'll do is I'll use this as an opportunity to change out this piece of wire and put another piece of heat shrink tubing on here I'll attach this to the battery pack and then we'll try it out here's a quick look at the battery pack with the wiring harness on it just before I cover this all up so the negative lead is attached here and you can see I have a piece of this protective pipe over the wire because the wire is going to run across the batteries like this now this pipe here is extremely high heat pipe this is the kind of stuff that you find in toasters so it's kind of a fibrous pipe so that protects the wire as it runs across the batteries here and on the top I've attached the two positive leads right here on this battery these are connected together it's just that there's not enough room to really attach both leads so I just split one off to this battery and one off to this battery and they're joined by that little jumper in the center there so now I'm just going to cover this thing up and we'll try it out okay here's the finished product it's all wrapped worked out quite nicely nice solid build so this is ready to go into the oscilloscope now the new battery pack is installed and as you can see it's quite a bit smaller than the lead acid battery there's still some room in here so I've cut some foam blocks and these foam blocks just tuck in here like this and just wedge the battery tight there's another little foam block right up here just so that this doesn't move around and transport on that battery door I put two pieces of weather stripping it's got an adhesive on one side and that way when I put this on like this it just gently presses up against the battery and snap this forward and it's nice and solid so that battery won't move around in there so next we'll take a look at the scope screen and see how it functions all right let's see if the scope runs on battery power now I don't have any probes hooked up to this thing right now just because I really don't plan on taking any measurements with it for those of you that are interested the probes plug in at the backside of the sculpture and they go right through the battery door so if you want to get the battery door off you have to pull the probe leads up you'll see the little probing jacks in there now a lot of people just leave the side of the bag kind of hanging open like this and then have the pro Oh bleeds coming out what I like to do is tuck the leads down here and then zip this little bag right up and then have the leads just exit out down here and then run along the bottom side of the oscilloscope that's nice and clean you don't have to have this little bag hanging open another nice thing about this little bag is it fits the probe leads quite nicely you don't have to wrap them up super tight or anything they just kind of gently fit in there so this case is a well-designed I like that a lot of the newer cases you got to wrap everything so incredibly tight and tuck it in a certain way and and then it's hard to get the zipper shut this is a really quite comfortable so I'll just shut some lights off here and we'll turn the scope on and get rid of the glare off the screen there there we go and no problems it's working great so the little box tells me what channel I'm on so this side here is channel one so if I move the position this trace on the top here will move up and down and if I hit channel two you'll see that little box will go over here now that means that if I just the same control this lower trace will move up and down it really is quite a user-friendly oscilloscope and it you know works very very well again it's a DC to 60 megahertz oscilloscope it is an early digital type of Scylla scope so once you get into the higher megahertz it you know again it does play connect the dots but you know if you're using this thing at you know around 30 40 megahertz it's absolutely fine you know up around 60 gotta be a little bit patient but you know if you're using this for troubleshooting audio or looking for a noise or anything it's absolutely great and what's not to love it's got a CRT thanks for stopping by the lab today hope you enjoyed this episode involving this small Tektronix oscilloscope if you did you can let me know by giving me a big thumbs up and hang around there'll be many more episodes just like this in the very near future touching on all sorts of different aspects in electronics vacuum tube and solid-state stuff so until next time care bye for now you

Channel: Mr Carlson's Lab

Views: 111,102

Rating: 4.961051 out of 5

Keywords: creativedesigncomponents.com, Creative Design Components, Tektronix 222, Tek digital oscilloscope, Tektronix oscilloscope, Tektronix 224 battery, Tektronix 222 battery, Tektronix DSO, Oscilloscope repair

Id: nLWVTFj_Yik

Length: 27min 50sec (1670 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 15 2016