Dom shares his impressions of the Bus Pirate as a prototyping and test tool:
OK I don’t say it often but the Bus Pirate is a superb piece of kit. The vast bulk of my work is design work with a wide range of IC’s and embedded devices, for this I spend a large amount of time using logic analysers which are superb; I even own a Zeroplus LAP-C myself at home. However my current personal project Skylifter uses the ADXL345, this is well known as a dog of a sensor to interface with and I was recommended by a friend at the London Hackspace to get a Bus Pirate… so I did!
I can say without hesitation this is one of the most useful tools to a hobbyist around, it does 75% of the work I use a LA for in a smaller package, it’s not tied to bulky software and far far more convenient to boot! Want to read back an EEPROM? Perfect!
Thanks for the feedback. It’s always great to read about your experience with the Bus Pirate, good or bad. We’ve had so much fun designing it, and it’s awesome when other people find it useful too.
The current design grew from our frustrations with earlier Bus Pirate versions, so if you hate it we’d like to know too. We’ll try to address the limitations and improve the firmware and/or hardware.
You can get a Bus Pirate today for $30, including worldwide shipping.
I must say the only thing I’d like to change would be a jumper to allow you to link 5V/3.3V to Vpullup, for testing devices like sensors connected solely to the BP; though I should shortly have a quick header board do do it!
Yeah, I agree that would be handy. I’ve always wanted to add FETs to switch it from software if there were pins to spare.