Introduction

A few weeks ago I spotted the launch promotion of the FNIRSI DLA Logic Analyser. It’s a low-cost USB Logic Analyser offered in two versions, DLA16 and DLA32 Plus. They are currently offering the DLA16 Plus at $159 and the DLA32 Plus at $259.

https://www.fnirsi.com/products/dla-32?variant=48343625040090

There is a 10% discount which seems to apply to everyone. I ordered the DLA32Plus directly from FNIRSI’ website on 15^th August and actually paid £180 (approx. $239).

It comes with all necessary leads, several hook probes and a nice little carrying case.

 It arrived here (South West Scotland) in just under two weeks. Royal Mail fluffed their small part of its long journey and delivered it to the wrong address. (They have form for this and like to deliver stuff to a different postcode from mine about half a mile away  - their favoured destination does share initials with me -  so I trotted off the M & M Kerr (Refrigerated Transport) who kindly gave me my parcel.)

I unpacked it and took a few photos:

Unboxing

The basic device is nicely made but I am a bit concerned about the way the cables plug into the multiway connector – it’s a 72 pin 1.27mm pitch dual row connector and the signal cables plug in using 8 way headers. The cables are nicely done with an earth connection for each signal and  individual coax cables with coloured tails (about 70 mm long) with numbered cable markers. The colour coding is not standard and each of the 5 supplied cables is the same. The numbering reads 11, 22,33 and 44 on each cable. The tiny headers don’t engage very tightly with the socket and I’m not sure how well they will last.

I would rather have seen a 2.54mm pitch header – it would have been bigger but much more robust.

I think that any difference in high-speed performance of the 1.27mm v 2.54mm headers would be swamped the tails and probes.

Specification

Both models have a huge 4Gb of capture memory and can sample up 8 channels at 1GHz, 16channels at 500MHz and the DLA32  can do 32 channels at 250Mhz .

At lower sampling rates you can stream to the computer memory.

Sampling thresholds can be set globally (the manual says from -5 to 5V  - I certainly have not tried a negative threshold).

There are 4 waveform outputs (actually 3.3V logic out 1Hz to 20MHz, PWM 1% to 99%)

In Use

Installing the software is simple enough – as is common you need to download it from the FNIRSI website. Versions for Windows and Mac are offered.

The appearance of the software is very clunky. The scaling is wrong and the vertical height of the channel display is fixed and much too big. Even on a 4k display you can’t get all 32 channels in view at once.

It powers up in Chinese and I had a hard time finding out how to switch to English and how to make it stay in English. (Run as Administrator, click where it now says Function in the top (but as delivered said it in Chinese) and then click English).

The screenshot shows the SPI decoder at work:

Some of the good stuff about the DLA32 is visible here – on the device config you can see that it can record 8 channels at 250Ms/s for 2s.

What you can’t see is that it offers  a huge number of decoders and the promise of writing your own. All the common decoder types are covered but most of the 170 are special to certain chips (there is one for Z80 !)  and it’s not likely that you’ll use many of them.

The promise of writing your own is a bit hollow – they are written in Python but it’s pre-compiled to you can’t use the existing decoders as examples. There is no decoder SDK  - or even mention of one on the website or in the manual.

This is as good a time as any to point out that there is very little in the (tiny) manual. You’ll need to spend time using AIs to make up for its utter hopelessness ! because the device is so new AI sources are not that good either – although they may well improve.

This is a screen from the Zero Plus Lap C Pro software in action - Dave Jones of the EEVBLOG thought it was clunky ( and it is a bit)  but much nicer to use than DLA32 software. 

Measuring

You can do cursors (which it calls Tags) and measure between them. And you can do measurements between edges by dragging the mouse pointer.

You can also set up a parameter measuring block which is quite nice except that it also illustrates another issue that comes up in several places – to FIRNSI dual language support seems to mean Chinese first and English in brackets. It makes things hard to read and use much more screen than they need to be:

Summary

The DLA32 has the core of a good product. Apart from a little concern re the multi pin connector the hardware is good and it’s offered at a good price.

My current LAP-C Pro cost £1250 5 years ago – and the DLA32 is at least as fast and has 64x as much memory.

But the Windows software on the DLA-32 Plus is  very disappointing – it’s not finished and doesn’t deliver what is promised.

The documentation is dreadful.

You’ll need to make your own minds up but right now I rate it 5 out of 10 and don’t recommend it.

If FNIRSI get the software sorted, get a support forum going with active tech support, provide an SDK for decoders and write a useable manual I’d rate it 9 out of 10.