Logic Analyzer

Hi Brian,

There's some on the Farnell website. If you want to do very specialist decodes, or high speed protocols, then you need to check if that's supported. Some specialist protocols end up needing particular gear.

Also many oscilloscopes have integrated logic analyzers too (often known as a 'mixed signal oscilloscope'.Some will handle a good suite of protocols, although it may be licensed. It has the advantage that the electrical properties of the bus can be examined too of course. Even without mixed signal capability some serial buses are easy to mentally decode from the 'scope trace. You don't mention it, but if you don't have a 'scope, that's perhaps a better instrument to acquire first. Picoscope have low-cost USB products (ballpark $100 USD) that have in-built serial decoding. The Picoscope software is free to download and you can explore the protocols available.

There's some open source logic analyzers (they use open source code, PulseView) so you can probably download the software and try it out, and check the list of protocol decodes available too, to see if the ones you need are available.

The open source logic analyzers are mostly similar to the basic 'Saleae Logic' product. That manufacturer sells other logic analyzers too.

There's also an open source ready-built product called Open Workbench Logic Sniffer, and there's another one based on an FPGA board. It too works with the Pulseview software.

Some logic analyzers may allow use with the free Wireshark software for certain protocols.

For low-speed inter-IC buses such as I2C and SPI, I tend to use an oscilloscope or the open source logic analyzer. Once the physical connections are made and the bus is functioning electrically, then I try to move to higher-level debugging (such as printf statements in the code) as quickly as possible however.

One really interesting opensource logic analyzer worth mentioning is BeagleLogic. https://beaglelogic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

If you have an old Beagle Bone Black lying around, Buy a Beagle Logic cape and convert that into a 12 + 2 channel logic analyzer. (https://github.com/abhishek-kakkar/BeagleLogic/wiki/The-BeagleLogic-Cape )

The whole project is open source. The design utilizes the PRUs of AM335x chipset.

BeagleLogic standalone is a single PCB solution utilizing Octavo system's OSD335 SoM

http://standalone.beaglelogic.net/en/latest/

Regards,

Aswin

One really interesting opensource logic analyzer worth mentioning is BeagleLogic. https://beaglelogic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

If you have an old Beagle Bone Black lying around, Buy a Beagle Logic cape and convert that into a 12 + 2 channel logic analyzer. (https://github.com/abhishek-kakkar/BeagleLogic/wiki/The-BeagleLogic-Cape )

The whole project is open source. The design utilizes the PRUs of AM335x chipset.

BeagleLogic standalone is a single PCB solution utilizing Octavo system's OSD335 SoM

http://standalone.beaglelogic.net/en/latest/

Regards,

Aswin