Bus Pirate: Practical guide to pull-up resistors

pullups.ii

See the latest version in the documentation wiki.

There’s often some confusion about how the Bus Pirate’s on-board pull-up resistors work. It doesn’t help that the implementation changes drastically from one hardware revision to the next, a lot of the original device tutorials are difficult to follow if you have a Bus Pirate v2go.

The figure outlines the basic parts of the Bus Pirate v2go on-board pull-up resistors. A pull-up (or pull-down) voltage supplied through the Vpullup (Vpu) pin is fed into a  CD4066 analog switch (IC3). The 4066 distributes the pull-up voltage to four 10K resistors (R20-23) that connect to the MOSI, CLOCK, MISO, and CS bus pins.

Continue reading our practical guide to the Bus Pirate v2go’s pull-up resistors after the break.

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Bus Pirate: Firmware v2.0 released

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Firmware v2.0 for all Bus Pirate hardware versions is available from the project’s Google Code page. Version 2 is a major upgrade recommended for all users. Follow our illustrated firmware upgrade guide. The default update speed is a paltry 9600bps, but you might be able to increase it.

Version 2.0 follows the v0g release. V0g is installed on the Bus Pirate v2gos in Hack a Day’s preorders (1&2). We highlight new features after the break, you might find help with issues in the forum.

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Bus Pirate: High-speed firmware updates

speed-up

See the latest version in the documentation wiki.

Quality control tests on the Bus Pirate preorder 1 flagged about 50 out of 400 units as defective. The terminal interface worked fine, but the bootloader wouldn’t connect.

The solution was to decrease the speed of the quick programmer utility to the Microchip recommended default, 9600bps. Unfortunately, it takes nearly 3.5minutes to update the firmware at 9600bps.

Most PICs, perhaps all, will work at higher speeds. Right click on the quick programmer speed setting for an options menu. Try connecting at different speeds until you find the highest reliable speed that works with your chip.

Read on for a detailed post-game analysis of the error, where it came from, the issues we faced, and the solution we ultimately chose.

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Bus Pirate: Firmware upgrades

overview

See the latest version in the documentation wiki.

The Bus Pirate has a bootloader that accepts software updates over the USB connection and writes them to the memory of the PIC 24FJ64GA002 microcontroller. Without a bootloader, we’d have update the firmware through the ICSP header using a ‘real’ programmer like an ICD2 or PICKIT2.

This guide explains how to update the Bus Pirate firmware using the bootloader and the Windows quick programmer utility.

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Bus Pirate 101

BPv3-101

This is an old version, see the latest version on the documentation wiki.

In this introductory tutorial we cover the basics of the Bus Pirate universal serial interface. First, we identify the different parts of the Bus Pirate and explain their function. Next, we cover driver installation and terminal configuration. Finally, we explain the user interface and demonstrate some basic terminal menu commands. There’s links to everything you need to start hacking with the Bus Pirate.

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