The Logic records 8 channels at 24MHz. The Windows software has useful features, and there’s an SDK if you want to write your own apps. Linux and Mac versions are under development. We really like this logic analyzer, and plan to use it to illustrate future articles. 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.

Big DNL spikes caused by an apparent mismatch between capacitors used in simulation and production, James Adams confirms. We’ve covered Pulseview being used in combination with cheap accessible analyzers before — a must-watch if you need to get yourself up to speed on the value they provide to a hobbyist. If an oscilloscope is what you need and a smartphone is what you have, perhaps you’ll enjoy the Scoppy firmware for the Pico. There are Differential Non-Linearities [2] and Integral Non-Linearities [3] caused by mis-matching of on-die ADC capacitors. When it debuted, the Logic was so popular that it was hard to buy one. It’s now widely available, and Saleae gave us one to try. Read our review below.Cross-platform. Works on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Android (and on x86, ARM, Sparc, PowerPC, ...). 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. This transaction shows the host issue the read configuration register command (0x05), and the SRAM response (0x41). The sigrok project aims at creating a portable, cross-platform, Free/Libre/Open-Source signal analysis software suite that supports various device types (e.g. logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, and many more). Reusable libraries. Consists of the libsigrok and libsigrokdecode shared libraries which can be used by various frontends/GUIs.

Now if I could only find a decent USB 2.0 oscilloscope. I think though, that that’s one realm where I still need a real device, perhaps with a decent USB transfer and control interface. 250MS/sec+, 2+ channels, 600V+ and decent triggering options (say an external trigger that I provide with the logic analyzer?) I looked at both this logic analyzer and the Usbee SX just last month, when I finally decided that my old Tektronix 1241 was no longer worth the electricity it burned, and even with GPIB couldn’t give me the flexibility I needed. There’s a four level trigger that watches the signals, and waits for a specific combination before it starts recording samples. Since we’re analyzing SPI, the most logical place to start capturing is when the SPI enable signal drops at the beginning of a bus transaction. We set the Logic trigger to start sampling when SPI enable is 0 by changing its trigger to ‘0’.

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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. 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. 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).