Option hack that 30 year old oscilloscope! by Tom Verbeure Oscilloscopes are wonderful devices that make invisible signals visible. For the longest time, they have been sold with all kinds of optional features for which you are supposed to pay good extra money. “Modern” oscilloscopes contain an embedded computer that doesn’t only manages the complex hardware and but also guards the key to these extra features. In this talk, I describe my quest to make available the hidden pots of gold of a 30 year old bare bones oscilloscope. A journey of weird interfaces, dumb pin swaps, counting chips on a PCB, disassembling firmware, and buying obsolete RAMs from Chinese brokers. There’s even a short run-in with Smalltalk, one of earlier object oriented programming languages. Tom spends most of his time in his garage. During the day to help create awesome gaming monitors, in the evening to work on one of his 20+ parallel hobby electronics projects. By writing about them on his blog, he forces himself to finish a project every once in a while.