We went a bit overboard speculating about the new Saleae 16bit logic analyzer. After taking to designer Joe Garrison at Maker Faire though, it seems we weren’t that far from the mark.
The new Saleae does in fact have a Spartan FPGA to help get a flexible sample rate as high as 100MHz for 2 channels and complex triggering. Future updates may include RLE compression for even faster/more reliable logic capture.
I encouraged Joe to make the software (and hardware) open source, but that’s probably not going to happen :)
it’s impossible ian,
I think that one of the most important thing and added value to saleae Logic is its software (cross platform). If they open it, they lose everything, as any Cypress based board can act like a saleae (firmware uplaoded at startup after renumeration).
Itead already sells a Cypress-based board that clones Saleae and several others, even without the open source client :) The Saleae 16 hardware is also more complicated than a breakout, so maybe they get people who test on a dev-board, but step up to the Logic 16.
The Saleae hardware package alone is well worth the money. At our quantities (from testing/pricing/sampling for our own projects) I’d guess the probe cables are probably $30. The milled case another $10 (assuming setup + a small run), a carry case, PCB. It could be $50 of stuff in $150 package to clone it directly (though maybe they do a ton of them and get great prices). That’s before recouping hardware/software development costs and beer.
I totally understand why it’s not open, most software and hardware isn’t open. My personal feeling is it just doesn’t matter. There are already clones, but Saleae (and the user community) don’t benefit from the design effort, nor can anyone contribute help and free labor to the client. Seems like a lose lose. Arduino is in the same boat. Dead simple hardware with huge effort in development and documentation, but they seem to be making a killing.
I think the Saleae is great, but development was stalled for a very long time there. Contrast that to what jawi and dogsbody have done for the OLS. Its pretty incredible. (Not to discount what Ian and Jack did, of course.)
ekkk! Open source is great for some things – but not this. You’d loose all the great design and nice GUI.
jawi’s sump client isn’t bad at all GUI-wise, and once he switches to the new display component it’s going to be excellent.
Also since the GUI is open, people can add protocol analysers and the like. If nobody else gets into it soon I’m going to try to start a USB analyzer with it, but I’m not sure if the existing OLS has enough storage to make it worthwhile or not.
I have had one of these for a while and consider it a bargain. I use it a lot at work to help write drivers for various comm peripherals. I have also found the company very receptive to suggestions and helpful.