While the Beagle 480 is $1200, the Beagle 12 (full/low speed) is only $400. You can force a high speed peripheral down to full speed by using a USB 1.1 hub. The protocols are identical at the application layer, although there are a few low-level differences in flow control packets.

http://www.totalphase.com/products/beagle_usb12/

The PS3 hack only needed full-speed descriptors:

http://rdist.root.org/2010/08/30/theories-of-how-ps-jailbrea...

http://rdist.root.org/2010/09/01/more-details-surface-on-ps-...

a hardware usb analyzer is just one of those things that's terribly expensive, not really even because of the hardware (its not that complicated) but because of the software which must be really good and this one runs on all OS's. I will admit I used this project as an excuse to get one but good electrical engineering tools cost in the thousands of $

Unfortunately, no. I worked for places that wouldn't even approve the purchase of the 2.0 beagle. I guess that what happens when the equipment and my pay come from separate budgets. That said one can use Linux as an analyser when windows is the usb-host by running windows in a vm. There are also software analysers that tap into the windows stack available. The Kinect is one of the few peripherals that isn't windows based.

There are some software-only tools like USBlyzer (Windows only I think) that work pretty well. I've been able to sniff traffic exactly like the examples in this Kinect page.

http://www.usblyzer.com