This is a new LCD adapter for the Bus Pirate. The board has been tested, Seeed is building a manufacturing prototype now. The Bus Pirate LCD library in firmware v5.4+ will require this LCD adapter instead of the old v1 adapter.

The v1 LCD adapter was based on a PCF8574 I2C IO expander IC. It took more than a second to update a 4×20 LCD screen, and the production price was too high to justify producing any.

The v2 adapter uses a cheap 74HCT595 8bit shift register instead. It has an SPI interface for blazing fast screen refreshes.

Read more about the v2 LCD adapter features and download the preliminary Eagle files in the forum.

The Bus Pirate v3b with an extended temperature range PIC is now in stock at Seeed. The extended temperature PIC doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a quirk of our tiny production runs.

Get a Bus Pirate for $30, including worldwide shipping at Seeed Studio. Adafruit also has the Bus Pirate and probe cables in stock and ready to ship.

MrHijets’ BIOS update [machine translation] went sour, but he revived it with the Bus Pirate and FlashRom:

In my case, Flashrom and the Bus Pirate saved my motherboard…

FlashRom support is an example of how open source and community driven development can extend a project beyond it’s original design. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to the Bus Pirate project.

Get a Bus Pirate for $30, including worldwide shipping at Seeed Studio. Adafruit also has the Bus Pirate and probe cables in stock and ready to ship.

The next batch of Bus Pirate v3b is almost ready. It will ship with bootloader v4.4 and firmware v5.3. It will also be the only known batch of Bus Pirates to use an extended temperature range PIC 24FJ64GA002-E/SS. There weren’t any standard industrial temperature range chips available, so Seeed sourced the extended range version.

These “E” PIC chips have a wider operating temperature range and cost a few cents more. The E chips are rated for -40c to 125c, compared to -40c to 85c with standard industrial chips. In practical terms this doesn’t mean anything because another component might not like higher temperatures, and internal oscillator doesn’t allow for overclocking.

In anticipation of ongoing delays, Seeed has backordered industrial range 24FJ64GA002-I/SS PICs too.

Get a Bus Pirate for $30, including worldwide shipping at Seeed Studio. Adafruit also has the Bus Pirate and probe cables in stock and ready to ship.

We go through a lot of prototype PCBs, and end up with lots of extras that we’ll never use. Every Sunday we give away a few professionally-made PCBs from one of our past or future projects, or a related prototype. Our PCBs are made through Seeed Studio’s Fusion board service.

This week we’re giving away an early Bus Pirate v4 prototype. This design has no software or support, it’s been abandoned in favor of a version with a USB PIC. We’re giving away two PCBs this week, just ask for one in the comments.

Some stuff:

• Yes, we’ll mail it anywhere in the world!
• Be sure to use a real e-mail in the address field so we can contact you for shipping info.
• First come, first serve. If we can’t contact the first commenters we move down the list, so you could consider making a request even if it looks like all the PCBs are gone.
• Limit one PCB per address per month please.
• Like everything else on this site, PCBs are offered without warranty.

We try to stagger free PCB Sunday posts so every time zone has a chance to participate, but the best way to see the post first is to subscribe to the RSS feed.

Bus Pirate firmware v5.3 is ready for download. This is a recommended update with bug fixes, enhanced features, and major code cleanup. The documentation wiki has been updated with the new commands and macros.

• Reviewed and updated terminal text
• SPI sniffer update (reduced minimum CS delay from 50us to 120ns)
• Removed sniff while CS high option from SPI sniffer (for now)
• I2C sniffer update (increased max speed from ~70kHz to >100kHz)
• Corrected LSB/MSB menu quirks
• Added least significant bit configuration to all modes
• Added |X command to convert byte X bitorder
• Code cleanup: removed allowLSB and allowPULLUP variables
• Fixed wrong CS terminal text in raw3wire mode

Read about the firmware update process for the ds30 Loader GUI (Windows/Linux) and pirate-loader console app (Windows/Linux/Mac). This firmware requires the v4+ bootloader, be sure you upgrade to the v4 bootloader first if you still have bootloader v2.

Get a Bus Pirate for $30, including worldwide shipping at Seeed Studio. Adafruit also has the Bus Pirate and probe cables in stock and ready to ship.

Adafruit has a new DS1307 real time clock kit. We’ve demonstrated the DS1307 with the Bus Pirate, which you can also pick up at Adafruit.

Bus Pirate firmware v5.3 is on track for release later this week. This will have some minor bug fixes, upgrades, and new features. You can download the latest nightly release from SVN. Nightlies are usually very stable, but new features may not be completely finalized.

• Reviewed and updated terminal text
• SPI sniffer update (reduced minimum CS delay from 50us to 120ns)
• Removed sniff while CS high option from SPI sniffer (for now)
• I2C sniffer update (increased max speed from ~70kHz to >100kHz)
• Corrected LSB/MSB menu quirks
• Added least significant input/output to all modes
• Added |X command to convert byte X bitorder
• Code cleanup: removed allowLSB and allowPULLUP variables

These updates have already gone into the nightly. If you have other requests please let us know in the v5.3 development thread.

To demonstrate some of the new commands from the new firmware 5.2, we interfaced the DE-DP014 from Sure-electronics. This is a single, SPI-like controllable 1.8″ single 5×7 dotmatrix. It has an on-board PIC controller which stores a special ASCII font. The package consist of two units, a simple demo board and two 10-pin cables. Sure provides a decent manual, which is only downloadable from their store.

The DE-DP014 has two 10-pin shrouded headers to provide power, brightness control, data-in, data-out, and clock. The top header is the input and the bottom one the output. Up to 20 units can be daisy chained (according to the manual, we don’t earn enough to buy such an amount!).

Get a Bus Pirate for $30, including worldwide shipping at Seeed Studio. Adafruit also has the Bus Pirate and probe cables in stock and ready to ship.

Connections

Bus Pirate v3a
Firmware v5.2 (r422) Bootloader v4.1
DEVID:0x0447 REVID:0x3043 (B5)

http://dangerousprototypes.com

HiZ>

We used an external power supply to power the device. The manual states the maximum power draw is 500mA, the Bus Pirate only can supply up to 160mA, so we didn’t dare to use it. On the back there are extra power supply connections. Next we connected the MOSI, CLK and GND to the unit. We also connected AUX to the dimmer input. We double checked the connections and powered everything up.

Setup

HiZ> m
1. HiZ
...
7. 3WIRE
8. KEYB
9. LCD
x. exit(without change)
(1)> 7
Set speed:
1. ~5KHz
2. ~50KHz
3. ~100KHz
4. ~400KHz
(1)> 2
Select output type:
1. Open drain (H=Hi-Z, L=GND)
2. Normal (H=3.3V, L=GND)
(1)> 2
Ready.
3WIRE>

We switched into raw3wire mode.

HiZ> m 7 2 2
R3W (spd hiz)=( 1 0 )
Ready.
3WIRE>

Alternatively we could use the shorthand form (not for the fainthearted!) to switch modes.

Always be sure to check if the settings are OK. The current settings should be printed before ‘Ready’. In this case speed=1 (0=5KHz, 1=50KHz, 2=100KHz, 3=400KHz) and HiZ=0 (0=off, 1=on). The settings are printed like they are in the code!

3WIRE> L
MSB set: MOST sig bit first
3WIRE>

The manual stated that the data should be MSB first (this is why we can’t use the hardware SPI module).

<pre>3WIRE> g 100 50
PWM active
3WIRE>

Also the dimmer input should have a PWM signal (or just a ‘1′) to display anything, we used a 100KHz with 50% duty-cycle.

Interfacing

3WIRE> "?"
WRITE: "?"
3WIRE>

Note that we used the concatenated version of this command and now finally we got to the point to display something! We’re gonna use a new feature of the v5.x firmware to easily display text strings. We introduced the ” command which send the string one-byte-a-time to the bus.

Say Cheese! Actually we wanted to show a ! but it was too hard to see on the pictures.

3WIRE> "STOP"
WRITE: "STOP"
3WIRE>

BTW we wonder what will happen if we installed four of these in our car and issued this command.

Bus Pirate firmware v5.2 is ready for download. This release has a grab-bag of improvements that all point north. The Bus Pirate documentation wiki has been refreshed and reorganized to match firmware v5.2.

• UART baudrate can be manually set to any speed for pcside (uart1) and protocol (uart2)
• Warning when the speed of uart2 is faster then uart1
• Fixed text formatting in self-test
• PWM and power are forbidden in HiZ
• Eliminated vpullup and vreg tracking variable
• Power supplies tested 2ms after W – if they are too low (short circuit) the BP throws an error and turns them off.
• Source cleanup. Removed lots of v0a and v2a defines (no longer supported since v3.6).
• Added a general any key to exit message
• I2C address search checks for a low bus and exits with a warning instead of showing 256 addresses. Good bye support nightmare :).
• Error if the I2C bus is low (no pullups or contention) at the I2C start bit,
• Fixed double display stuff in the raw2wire ATR macros
• Fixed the frequency measure after voltage bug
• Removed the repeat on /\-_
• The 1-wire library – and _ set the data state variable but don’t send a bit. This is more consistent with other bus modes.
• Added a peek function to 1-wire that returns the stored data state.

Get a Bus Pirate for $30, including worldwide shipping at Seeed Studio. Adafruit also has the Bus Pirate and probe cables in stock and ready to ship.

V5.3 will probably have some of these improvements:

• I2C sniffer update
• Terminal text review and refresh
• PIC extensions to raw2wire
• Flashrom bug followup
• Expanded protocol documentation in the wiki for each bus mode

Are there any changes you’d like to see? Any specific requests as we refresh the terminal text? After we finish the update, it would be great to update the translation files to the new format and release localized versions again.