It’s a lot of fun to develop the Bus Pirate, but nothing is more satisfying than hearing that it actually helped someone:
I am trying to get a new router setup for when I move to a more permanent home here in a couple weeks. At some point I messed up a config file or two and locked myself out of all the lan subnets/VLANS. I had to pop open the case to get at the serial console. This is brought out to a row of unpopulated .100″ holes and operates at 3.3v levels. I of course had my Bus Pirate laying on my desk/workbench. In a matter of seconds I had the console up in a terminal window using the transparent pass through macro. A couple quick vi edits and the Ethernet connections were back up.
You can get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors Adafruit and Open Source Control Systems. Each purchase supports further development of this open source project.
I had a dead PC after a BIOS update went wrong.
flashrom and bus pirate to the rescue :-)