Bus Pirate firmware v3 will be released in the near future. Are there any minor tweaks or moderate feature additions that you’d like to see in V3? It’s probably too late for major additions like a new protocol, but we’d like to know if there’s any popular updates we can schedule for the big v3 release. The issue tracker might give you some ideas.
Beyond v3, are there any major new features you’d like? I2C and improved SPI snoopers are a popular request, they’ll probably be added to the new binary mode for better speed and performance. CAN and OBD-II protocols are also frequently requested.
Tags: Development, roadmap
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OBDII YES YES YES
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I’m new at this electronic stuff. I am playing with a spartan 3 boards. Can I use the bus pirate as a JTAG programmer? Is it possible to do this? I can’t wait for to play with my bus pirate. 4 weeks is a long time to wait (preorder 2).
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@Jay – The Bus Pirate has a basic JTAG interface mode with macros for common functions like initializing and identifying JTAG chains. You’ll be able to talk to the JTAG interface on the Spartan chips.
Older firmwares (before v2.1 or so) also had an XSVF JTAG programmer in the terminal, you can downgrade to one of those (v2go will work in v3). The XSVF programmer was very specialized and required an advanced toolset. It was also really huge and not user friendly. We took it out to make space for other features, and added a new binary mode that can be used with a full JTAG programmer with GUI for Windows, Linux, etc. There’s no software for it yet, but hopefully someone will take interest and get it started.
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@ Jay – Here’s a review of the JTAG features:
http://hackaday.com/2008/12/01/bus-pirate-firmware-update-v0c-jtag-and-more/
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Hi, what about driving servomotors with the buspirate ? It should not be difficult, since there is already a PWM generator on the buspirate. But as far as I know, we cannot generate a PWM below 1KHz, which is too high.
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@Rlsmanu – Great suggestion. Do you have a run down of the common speeds? I can do that easily with a timer. I also plan to make a break-out board to drive stepper motors.
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Yes, it will be very usefull to add the possibility to drive stepper motors!
For the servomotors, a frequency of 300Hz could be sufficiently low (the period should be between 3 and 20milliseconds). And then, the time at the high state will determine the output angle of the servomotor (between 0.5 and 2.5ms approximately, depending on the type of servomotor).
So either you can set a frequency between 400Hz (=2.5ms at the high state) and 2KHz (=0.5ms at the high state) to drive the servomotor. Or you can set a fixed frequency of 300Hz for example and change the duty cycle to change the output angle of the servomotor.
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@ian
If I understand you correctly, it’s possible to program the spartan boards if I use the binary mode. However, I need to develop the software for it. Is it correct? I will look into it as soon as I got my board.Since the space in PIC is limited and I can imagine that there will be a lot of interesting features for bus pirate, one thing that might be interesting in the ability to prepare a custom firmware using some sort of plugin mechanism. We can choose only the protocols that we are interested in. I am not sure if it’s possible. I am quite new in embedded development.
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@jay – If you can get your JTAG programming file (usually SFV?) in the XSFV format, the easiest thing is probably to downgrade to an older firmware (you can always upgrade again) and use the XSFV programmer. The Hack a Day link explains my experience with this.
The ‘ideal’ future solution is to identify an existing (popular) (cross-platform) JTAG programming app, and add support for the Bus Pirate binary mode. A few people have looked at this but I haven’t seen any code, there’s a few posts in the forum. So to answer you question (finally), yes, someone will need to develop the software for this part.
Since the Bus Pirate can have new firmware uploaded over USB, it’s essentially a PIC24FJ64GA002 development board – there could be lots of different firmwares that can be loaded as needed. The firmware source is constructed so that you can add and remove modules from base.h without too much fuss. This is a custom compile though, and not a tailor made executable. I honestly have no idea how to do that, or if it could even be done.
If you’re inclined on the software side, and decide to work on a JTAG app, please start a thread in the forum. I’ll help in any way I can.
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This is a little bit late maybe, but I would be really interested in an RS-485 interface for it.
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