I recently recovered a dead MSO-X 3014A with a 1GHz upgrade from e-waste. On power up just the Ref, Math, Digital and Serial lights would turn on, but nothing else would happen. I posted over at the EEVBlog forums and those folks suspected the problem was due to corrupt NAND and could be recovered by loading some firmware via serial. They did provide documentation there, which was great, but I still had to wrestle with a bunch of stuff. In one of you happens to come across one of these that needs to be recovered, and you only have a Mac, here are some tips.
First, check out the thread with the basic instructions here. Everything there is done on windows, and as best I can tell, some steps just have to be done on windows because of the utilities involved in getting the firmware ready to load onto the device over serial and install over USB.
I tried to do everything with an M1 MacBook Pro, but right now Windows and VMWare Fusion 13 are just too broken. Basic stuff like sharing files between the Mac/Windows, copy/paste and providing access to the serial adapter were either completely broken or very unreliable. So I installed Fusion 13 and Windows 11 on an Intel MacBook Pro which worked well, other than being slow. You'll need to install Python 2 for the included script to work. I just installed the latest 2.7 build. The steps to get the files ready to copy are a little dense, but if you take your time, you'll get through it.
The next issue is getting the firmware copied over to the scope via serial. The scope requires a transfer via ymodem which not all terminal emulators support. The guide recommends TeraTerm for Windows. In my experience, it would start to transfer but then fail without error randomly. To get around this, I ended up coping the binary to the Mac side. I tired CoolTerm which has a good enough GUI, but doesn't seem to support ymodem. It'd upload the file, but then the scope would time out. What I found to work was minicom, configured with lrzsz. First install lrzsz and minicom via homebrew. Then launch minicom and change the ymodem configuration from sb to lsb and rb to lrb. With that config the file uploaded successfully and the scope booted.
The instructions then guide you to update the scope from a USB stick. I thought I had everything setup correctly, but the scope would just boot loop. It turns out the USB stick needs to be removed at some point, but it wasn't clear when. I unplugged it after a reboot at some point and the scope finally booted up to an updated firmware that should avoid corrupting the NAND again.
So now I have an awesome scope for free other than a bit of tinkering. Definitely keep an eye out for one of these in the same condition. It could save you a fortune!
First, check out the thread with the basic instructions here. Everything there is done on windows, and as best I can tell, some steps just have to be done on windows because of the utilities involved in getting the firmware ready to load onto the device over serial and install over USB.
I tried to do everything with an M1 MacBook Pro, but right now Windows and VMWare Fusion 13 are just too broken. Basic stuff like sharing files between the Mac/Windows, copy/paste and providing access to the serial adapter were either completely broken or very unreliable. So I installed Fusion 13 and Windows 11 on an Intel MacBook Pro which worked well, other than being slow. You'll need to install Python 2 for the included script to work. I just installed the latest 2.7 build. The steps to get the files ready to copy are a little dense, but if you take your time, you'll get through it.
The next issue is getting the firmware copied over to the scope via serial. The scope requires a transfer via ymodem which not all terminal emulators support. The guide recommends TeraTerm for Windows. In my experience, it would start to transfer but then fail without error randomly. To get around this, I ended up coping the binary to the Mac side. I tired CoolTerm which has a good enough GUI, but doesn't seem to support ymodem. It'd upload the file, but then the scope would time out. What I found to work was minicom, configured with lrzsz. First install lrzsz and minicom via homebrew. Then launch minicom and change the ymodem configuration from sb to lsb and rb to lrb. With that config the file uploaded successfully and the scope booted.
The instructions then guide you to update the scope from a USB stick. I thought I had everything setup correctly, but the scope would just boot loop. It turns out the USB stick needs to be removed at some point, but it wasn't clear when. I unplugged it after a reboot at some point and the scope finally booted up to an updated firmware that should avoid corrupting the NAND again.
So now I have an awesome scope for free other than a bit of tinkering. Definitely keep an eye out for one of these in the same condition. It could save you a fortune!
