Openbench Logic Sniffer comes of age

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 22:11:00 GMT

A while back I bought a Openbench Logic Sniffer from Dangerous Prototypes. Whilst it kind-of worked it was most definitely alpha and really not much practical use - no big deal considering the low price. However everything is field-upgradable so I put it to one side and more or less forgot about it. Over the last few days I've revisited the project and upgraded everything, and it's turning into a fantastic little tool. The first thing of note is that the FPGA core has been completely rewritten by doggsbody, who almost unbelievably has managed to get most of the functionality of a HP16550A logic analyser into the FPGA, although the user interface hasn't yet been extended to allow access to all the new goodness.

The original flakiness between the FPGA and the PIC processor used to glue everything together seems to have been solved as well. The real icing on the cake is there's also a new client to drive it all - the old SUMP client was really getting a bit long in the tooth, and there's a new and much superior version that Jawi has produced. Unfortunately although the client is written in Java, it didn't work Solaris as it didn't include the Solaris version of the RXTX JNI library. Jawi very kindly helped me get it all working, and even better he's integrated Solaris support into the next release as well, so it will just work out of the box. There's still more work to be done, for example, from what I can gather the 200MHz sampling mode still doesn't work properly, but having said that the progress since I last took a serious look a the project is very impressive.

The last thing of note is there's now a buffer wing available that allows you to use all of the available 32 channels with 5V inputs - I'm very tempted to get one :-)

Alan's Ramblings - openbench logic sniffer tag

Openbench Logic Sniffer comes of age