New toy: Saleae Logic

DarrenF

Well-known member
Joined
Jan 7, 2011
Messages
5,855
Reaction score
526
Location
Florida
My new toy arrived today: http://www.saleae.com/logic

Got the software d/l'd and installed np; hooked it up and had it working right out of the box in minutes. It's so simple and intuitive, I haven't even bothered to read any documentation yet, but I've been hooking it up to various logic chips and acquiring data and playing. It's amazing how tiny the thing is. Even with my underpowered netbook (with no other apps running and no other USB devices connected) it had no complaints capturing data at its max rate (24MHz).

Haven't had a chance to actually use it to diagnose a real-life problem, but I'll report back with pics and screenshots when I do. (May be a while, not to many board problems fail to expose themselves with the 'scope...)
 
Looks almost identical to the USBee SX logic analyzer.

I used the above when I designed the IO board for the
upcoming WOZ pinball machine.

JD
 
Darren, I wish you would of posted about this first, there is actually a Better one for a lot cheaper, I have the saleae, it does work nice, but limited to 8/24Mhz channels, and make sure you have a LOT of ram!

I ordered one of these, have yet to play with it:

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9857?

Capture 50MHz+ waveforms on 32 channels
200Msps captures up to 100MHz waveforms on 16 channels
100Msps captures up to 50MHz waveforms on 32 channels
16 buffered channels, 5 volt tolerant
M74LCX16245DTR2G transceiver tolerates voltages from -0.5V to +7V.
216K Block RAM supports following memory configurations*
8 channels with 24K sample depth
16 channels with 12K sample depth
32 channels with 6K sample depth
External clock and trigger input
Allows interfacing with external test equipment and daisy chaining OLS's for additional channels.
Internal clock and trigger output
16bit wing expansion header
USB interface, USB powered
USB upgradable everything
Designed for the SUMP logic analyzer client
Open source

Link to software: http://www.sump.org/projects/analyzer/
 
Maybe i will demo @ Gamewarp along with the Orion Board we had at SPF.
 
16+ channels is a must. Even just tracing the address bus will eat up 16 channels.
 
he works there, i'm pretty sure he can play as many woz(s) he wants :) and hobbits too.
 
No matter. I don't regret the purchase. It's my first foray into logic analyzers, so the easy-to-use factor is very nice. I'm rarely looking at signals faster than the pixel-clock for standard resolution (about 6MHz) so 25Msamples/s is enough for my needs; if the counters between that and the crystal are bad, I don't need a logic analyzer to figure it out.
I also didn't figure I'd be looking at the entire address bus; I'm not trying to reverse engineer custom ICs, like some people... ;)

I think it'll be handy to help isolate bad TTL that are tough to otherwise identify. To do that, 8 channels would seem to be enough for many/most cases.

The sparkfun unit does look neat, though. Do they have a nice case that fits it, too?
 
Old thread I know but I'm interested....

Wouldn't you want to fetch input/output of certain TTLs and/or capture address bus _and_ databus at the same time to be able to really analyze what's going on ?
 
Old thread I know but I'm interested....

Wouldn't you want to fetch input/output of certain TTLs and/or capture address bus _and_ databus at the same time to be able to really analyze what's going on ?

Ideally, sure... if you've got 32 or 64 channels (or more). Would be great to have it grab the full 8 or 16 bit data bus plus 16-32 bits of address bus, recognize opcodes, and show the code being executed, while simultaneously looking at some random TTL gates of interest.

However, many issues can be solved with just the address & data buses (like many HP LAs do) to trace execution.

And some problems can benefit from a simple analysis of the I/O of a single TTL, irrespective of the CPU (although a logic comparator might be more direct and a logic probe is often adequate).
 
Back
Top Bottom