E36233A mini review - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / testgear

author: niner_007
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 29, 2021, 09:47:36 pm
content: E36233A, is a switching pre-regulator design, with a post linear stage.I noticed there is no power monitoring when the supply is in series or parallel mode. The power meter always reads 0W, also no Wh power meter.Could not make remote sense working in parallel or series mode.I noticed about 0.5V for a few hundreds of milliseconds between CH1+ and CH2- during bootup, this is when the supply config is in series, and the supply is restarted. The supply resets to independent channels, however I observe this stray voltage between CH1 and CH2 during the bootup sequence. CH1+/CH1- and CH2+/CH2- does not have this issue.The rotary encoder increment are fixed and only in 1mV/1mA steps, this is inconvenient and make the knobs completely impractical for adjusting voltage or current, I could not find a way or a cursor to select the digit I want to change, or increase this increment by 10, or 100, or alternately increase the linear acceleration factor. The knobs are nice, but are never ever used due to this software usability problem. They could just not been installed, and you wouldn't miss anything.The data logging view is very useful for logging to a USB drive for example, but does not provide a usable experience to visualize the V/I graphs real time. Specifically, setting up offsets, and the scale is very cumbersome in the software, and requires a lot of button presses, to increment the offsets, or the scale. And it is also unfortunate that unless you log to a file, you cannot see the graph. There also seems to be a bug where switching the selection of the channels/series on the graph is skipping some channels and they are not selectable until all channels/series are disabled.The verdict is that this is a good supply, reliable, a lot of power, versatile, robust communication and remote programming, definitely does the job. However, when purchasing this supply I am paying for features that are not thought out well, or broken, like the knobs or the graph view. I have a problem with that, and it would been better if this supply simply did not have these features at all in the first place, than having them broken like that.Instead of going with E36233A, I went with an Envox BB3, with three of the DCP405 modules installed, 40V, 5A, 155W, for 465W total, or 10A in parallel mode between channel 1 and 2. The graph view has issues (but because of OSS can be fixed) on the Envox too, but, the knob is much better, and has an absolutely fantastic and responsive touch screen interface.If I get a Keysight supply today in the 200W+ range, it would be one from the E3630 series, which is rock solid.

author: H_Zhang
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: November 10, 2021, 02:55:38 pm
content: I bought E36232 and EL34143 at the same time, the experience is very bad! They both have serious anti-human logic in their basic operations. The device has knobs but no way to adjust voltage or current by bit. Only 0.001V per turn of the knob, which makes the knob useless!

author: niner_007
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 01, 2022, 07:18:35 am
content: Yeah, I agree, the ball was dropped in a big way on the new power products from Keysight

author: J-R
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 01, 2022, 01:15:45 pm
content: I also partially agree about these Keysight models, although it can depend a lot on what you are doing on a daily basis. I have the E36313A. The number keypad can be great for quick entries. Plenty of good and bad to be found. Pretty quiet. My main supply at the moment. You can increment steps if you program it in...On the E3610xA power supplies you can select any specific digit to increment via the rotary encoder. It's great if you just want to manually quickly go from say 1V to 25V in 1V steps. Slightly noisy fan when the output is on.When I have a lot of fiddling to do, I use my HP 66332A, which gives you a number pad, arrow keys AND a rotary encoder. It's really great to use compared to pretty much everything else. Being able to select a digit and then tap the up/down arrows is too much fun. Just a bit noisy, though.I also picked up the EEZ BB3 kit recently. Got a great deal on an older stock unit. The UI isn't perfect there either, as you can't increment by 1V for example, only via the 4 preselected options. It also covers up the main display when using it. The rotary encoder is barely usable right now in my opinion. I tinkered a bit with the options and gave up. It's too easy to accidently zoom up by many volts at once. Also the OVP is very annoying. A few other quirks. Silent most of the time.

author: Kean
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 03, 2022, 11:15:00 am
content: Quote from: J-R on January 01, 2022, 01:15:45 pmHave you done a firmware update? The rotary encoder operation was improved, and a lot of other improvements.The hardware OVP can cause problems in some use cases, but it can be disabled.

author: J-R
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 03, 2022, 01:11:45 pm
content: Quote from: Kean on January 03, 2022, 11:15:00 amYes, I updated to the 1.7.3 firmware as soon as I got it. The encoder & overall UI needs work. About the best I could come up with was to hold the user switch down, change to encoder step, set the step, then switch the user switch back to inhibit. Not sure why the encoder button isn't customizable.The hardware OVP is flaky, use the encoder knob to zoom down a bit and it trips, but manually select a much lower voltage and it doesn't.I'm sure the other advanced features of the box make the minor annoyances worth it for most people. I haven't gotten that far into it or tried customizing the firmware.

author: exe
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 03, 2022, 10:20:38 pm
content: Quote from: J-R on January 01, 2022, 01:15:45 pmI just checked my unit, I was able to set 1V increments. For that, I assigned user-defined button to switch encoder increments, then pressed it three times on main screen and voila.

author: J-R
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 04, 2022, 04:45:19 am
content: Quote from: exe on January 03, 2022, 10:20:38 pmEh, not really, if you set it to 1.5V then try to go up to 2.5V it goes straight to 3.0V, then 4.0V etc. instead.

author: niner_007
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 04, 2022, 10:24:43 pm
content: The BB3 is open source, you can always change it. With Keysight or Keithley, there are no guarantees anything will be fixed, Keithley’s new touch screen meters still can be made to crash to date, and Keysight treats software as an after though.

author: J-R
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 04, 2022, 11:45:05 pm
content: Quote from: niner_007 on January 04, 2022, 10:24:43 pmOK, sounds good, please fix it and send me the updated firmware.

author: exe
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 05, 2022, 12:34:40 pm
content: Quote from: J-R on January 04, 2022, 04:45:19 amAh, got it. (Actually, I like it working this way).May be an alternative solution would be to set voltage from computer from a script. Or, it's probably possible to implement this in micropython (that would run on BB3 unit itself, not on computer). I can give it a shot, if you buy me coffee.

author: J-R
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 05, 2022, 06:49:21 pm
content: Quote from: exe on January 05, 2022, 12:34:40 pmWell, not a fan here...There is no reason to go down the scripting route, I have another device (HP 66332A) that does what I want perfectly already, just turn it on and go. So the BB3 sits in the corner for now and I need the bench space for the E36313A. I hope to have a different work area this fall where I can set up more equipment at once.I really don't hate the BB3, but no device is perfect and use cases are different.Also, having a few different pieces of equipment to tinker with is definitely a luxury, I'm choosing to spend discretionary funds on this hobby for the time being so there will be some nitpicking.