Digital analyzers — Saleae Logic 8
Eight channels of ground truth: see exactly what the wires are saying, and decode the protocol on top.
When you are working on hardware, guessing is expensive and a logic analyzer ends the argument. The Saleae Logic 8 gives eight channels of digital capture (and analog on the same probes), and the Logic 2 software decodes the protocols on top of the raw edges — SPI, I2C, UART, 1-Wire, CAN and a long list of others — so you get "the flash chip returned 0x90" instead of a wall of transitions. Being able to run those decoders after capture, on a recording you can save and share, is what makes it worth the money over a cheap clone. That is the workflow for most hardware jobs: probe the debug header, capture boot, find the UART, and read what the device tells you before it has finished starting up. Sniffing an SPI flash during boot is also frequently faster than desoldering it. On a budget, the generic 8-channel 24 MHz clones work fine with sigrok/PulseView — the open-source stack, which also drives the Saleae hardware — and DreamSourceLab's DSLogic sits in between.
Tags
Links
- Saleae — www.saleae.com
- Logic 2 software — www.saleae.com
- sigrok / PulseView (open source) — sigrok.org