from Hacker News

BusPirate V5 Now Shipping

by grymoire1 on 1/21/24, 5:33 PM with 22 comments

• by calamari4065 on 1/21/24, 9:42 PM

  I grabbed a bus pirate about a year ago thinking "oh, of course it will support JTAG"

  This involved flashing a third party firmware. From a project which refuses to release binaries. I had to install something like 5GB of toolchains to build it, and then THEN! I had to manually edit the resulting .hex file. At some point the binary is converted to an ASCII representation of the hex pairs, but all letters converted to uppercase. Then it's parsed back into binary with the wrong values. I had to manually search and replace uppercase letters with lowercase.

  I've seen a lot of dumb software nonsense in my time, but this one really takes the cake.

  It also never actually worked. Hopefully the firmware on this revision is less terrible

• by a2800276 on 1/21/24, 5:51 PM

  This seems dodgy... Anyone knows what's up. After a couple of years, a buspirate.com domain pops up out of nowhere and there's absolutely no mention of the change on dangerous prototypes?

• by roughly on 1/21/24, 11:42 PM

  So by and large I can read the words on the page and mostly understand what this thing is, but can someone explain what it’s used for and maybe how they use it?

• by unwind on 1/22/24, 8:25 AM

  Wow! Great to see this here, I'm being slightly nostalgic but this feels like it really deserves some kind of success.

  I bought the predecessor (v3 because reasons) in 2010 for $27, it's impressive that this new version which has seriously improved capabilities is only $37.

  As is normal with software developers having an electronics hobby, I haven't used it all that much, but the few times I have needed it I was really glad to have it and it made me happy.

• by peter_d_sherman on 1/22/24, 7:16 AM

  Looks very cool. Wishing you a lot of luck in this endeavor!

  A few quick questions:

  1) Max data acquisition speed?

  2) Max data buffer?

  3) Are start/stop triggers available? (i.e., start buffering data when you see a specific binary string, stop after say 4K, 8K, 16K, etc. or when secondary binary string is seen, or start/stop when other conditions are true, etc.)

  4) Max speed talking to host PC (not the chip or circuit being debugged) -- How fast?

  5) Max continuous data streaming speed to host PC? (As opposed to buffering in local RAM? So data from Debug Chip or Circuit -> BusPirate -> Host PC... how fast (max sustainable speed) if continuous?)

  Anyway, looks very cool!

• by grymoire1 on 1/21/24, 5:33 PM

  The final (Rev 10) version of BusPirate V5 is shipping.