TOOLS: SALEAE LOGIC, LOGIC ANALYZER
A logic analyzer records bus communications between two chips. If you’ve ever had a problem getting two chips to talk, or wanted to reverse engineer a protocol, a logic analyzer is the tool you need to spy on the bus.
The Logic is a USB logic analyzer with eight channels and sampling rates up to 24MHz. among hobby-level logic analyzers, the Logic has a good mix of features and respectable sampling rates. We’ve been following Joe Garrison’s work on the Logic for a long time. If you’ve ever considered bringing a product to market, you can learn a lot from Joe’s blog that papers his development process.
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.
Logic Analyzers vs. Oscilloscopes
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.
你得到什麼
The Logic comes packaged in an external hard drive case. The analyzer is a small, anodized aluminum puck with laser etched signal markers. It’s much smaller than we expected, slightly smaller than a compact flash storage card. A mini-B USB cable is included.
A heavy-gauge cable and nine E-Z-Hooks (5 shown) connect the Logic to a circuit. The hooks are a really nice touch; press the back of the hook to expose a pair of tweezers, get hold of onto a signal wire, and retract to hold it in place. The retractable tweezers stop accidental shorts on cramped test circuits.
Software isn’t included, instead you get instructions to download the current version from the Saleae web site. We always download the current software, so we appreciate that there’s one less CD headed to the landfill.
Right now, only Windows XP/Vista software is available, but Mac and Linux software must be ready soon. Warning: the Windows version requires .NET 3.5, download the redistributable off-line installer if you don’t want to give Internet access to Microsoft’s online installer.
使用它
Using the Logic is simple. connect the gray ground wire to the ground of the test circuit, then hook into the signal lines you want to record. We connected it to the 32K SPI SRAM that we demonstrated earlier this week. SPI has four important signals; enable, data in, data out, and clock. The E-Z-Hooks make it dead basic to tap into the signals without accidental shorts.
Be mindful of wire orientation. We associate a black wire with ground, but the Logic cable uses gray. comments on SparkFun’s product page suggest that reversing the connections will damage the Logic.
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.
There’s a four level activate that watches the signals, and waits for a certain combination before it starts recording samples. considering that 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 activate to start sampling when SPI enable is 0 by changing its activate to ‘0’.
We really like the profiles that decode a lot of common serial protocols; 1-Wire, I2C, SPI, and asynchronous serial. CAN and other protocols will be added eventually.
Profiles suggest names for each signal, and convert squiggly lines into readable byte values. This is a really awesome feature. Without it, you’d have to count clock pulses to identify byte boundaries, and then manually decode the values.
This transaction shows the host issue the read configuration register command (0x05), and the SRAM action (0x41).
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).
A look inside
The Logic is based on the Cypress Semiconductor CY7C68013A-56PVXC, an Intel 8052 microcontroller with a USB peripheral. The 8052 is an enhanced version of the well-known 8051. We can also identify a 24MHz crystal, which is probably multiplied to 48 or 96MHz by an internal phase-locked loop.
結論
Logic analyzers take the guess work out of debugging inter-chip communication. If you can’t see what’s going on, the best you can do is guess about the problem. When a project won’t work, 99% of the time we can fix the problem right away by checking out th使用邏輯分析儀的信號。 沒有它，沒有簡單的方法可以知道正在發生的事情。
邏輯記錄在24MHz的8個通道。 Windows軟件具有有益的功能，如果要寫自己的應用程序，則有一個SDK。 Linux和Mac版本正在開發中。 我們真的很喜歡這個邏輯分析儀，併計劃使用它來說明未來的文章。
Saleae網站和Sparkfun的邏輯是149美元，喬正在努力歐盟分銷。 如果您對邏輯感興趣，但還沒準備好購買，可以下載軟件並在演示模式下嘗試。
黑客審查披露：我們要求邏輯和索雷發給我們