Monthly Archives: July 2013

Opinion: Low Cost Logic Analyzers

Dave Jones, from the EEVBlog, recently did a review of the Saleae Logic, and he basically bashed it because he’s been working in the EE field for decades and owns equipment worth many thousands of dollars.

This post isn’t really a review, it’s more like a piece of advice. I have written this from the point of view of a hobbyist, especially a poor one. The Saleae Logic holds a special place in my heart because I’m pretty sure it’s responsible for a lot of my success.

Plus, watching Dave use the Saleae software is cringe worthy. The triggering options were pretty obvious and intuitive, but he just didn’t see them. Also I think he didn’t setup Continue reading

Review: Total Phase Beagle USB 12 Analyzer

I obtained a Total Phase Beagle USB 12. This is an USB traffic analyzer that is capable of capturing USB traffic at full speed and low speed. It is a physical device that sits in between a host and a device, while the traffic between the two are sent to my computer so I can view every single event.

This one is a hardware analyzer, which is different from software analyzers. I tried various software analyzers before, there are some disadvantages of software based analyzers:

  • filter drivers make my laptop slower and sometimes unstable (sometimes my USB devices stop working, and sometimes I get a BSOD)
  • cannot capture data between a device and a seperate host that’s not the computer running the software
  • cannot let you unplug and replug and continue the capture (maybe this is not true for more expensive software)
  • cannot detect low level errors
I will be working on a embedded USB host project soon. Something to do with

Continue reading