We really like the profiles that decode most common serial protocols; 1-Wire, I2C, SPI, and asynchronous serial. CAN and other protocols will be added eventually. Most modern electronics projects will benefit more from a logic analyzer than an oscilloscope. An oscilloscope displays a graph of an analog voltage as it varies over time, such as the curve of a sine wave. A logic analyzer only detects high and low digital states, but it records many signals simultaneously. Logic analyzers dump data to a computer for analysis, very few oscilloscopes have this feature. I just got my first logic analyzer from a family member for Christmas (as merely a hobbiest, I couldn’t afford dropping money on one for myself… I just don’t have quite enough need) this past year. I wasn’t involved in the decision-making process (thus the disadvantage of *not* buying for oneself), but the got me a USBee SX series — it’s very similar in form factor to this little baby, and I suspect is approximately similar in specifications. Works pretty well to help debug my PIC projects.

A logic analyzer records bus communications between two chips. If you’ve ever had a problem getting two chips to talk, or wanted to reverse engineer a protocol, a logic analyzer is the tool you need to spy on the bus. The software analyzes and displays signal captures. The primary configuration options are the sampling rate (200KHz-24MHz) and number of samples (millions to billions). We were able to sample at 24MHz, but the top speed depends on how much other stuff is using the USB bus. A 24MHz sampling rate can capture signals up to 12MHz, we found this suitable for all the protocols we use. The total number of samples is limited only by the available PC RAM. Ian – re other products: I don’t want to post a commercial for anyone, so I won’t mention my favorite by brand name. Just do a google search for “logic analyzer”. There’s about a zillion products in this price range out there these days. wooddragon48 has updated components for the project titled 3D Printed Repeating Crossbow/Sling Shot Pistol.

ericwertz – if you need to look at 50mhz digital data, then 100Mhz sampling is not nearly enough. Nyquist theory is meaningful for analog analysis, and is a limitation that applies directly to the highest frequency pure sine wave component of the signal – exclusive of phase. Digital analysis is very different. You could barely represent a square wave sampling at Nyquist, and thus would get virtually no timing information from the resulting waveforms. You’ll need to sample 4-10 times your bus rate to get meaningful timing information. fiddlingjunky said: “One thing to keep in mind is the RP2040/Pi Pico does have a hardware bug (slightly mis-specced internal capacitances) that create ~9LSB non-linearity (0.22% of measurement range) at 4 points.” Big DNL spikes caused by an apparent mismatch between capacitors used in simulation and production, James Adams confirms. Cross-platform. Works on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Android (and on x86, ARM, Sparc, PowerPC, ...). Broad hardware support. Supports many different devices (logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, multimeters, data loggers etc.) from various vendors.

This transaction shows the host issue the read configuration register command (0x05), and the SRAM response (0x41).We also tried the 1-Wire decoder with a DS2431 EEPROM. The software identified the 1-Wire reset command, and the 1-Wire ‘search rom’ command (0xf0).