Show HN: FarProbe – Access Logic Analyzers from the Browser
farprobe.com
If you don't have the hardware, check out the demo video we prepared for YC over a month ago, we're now live: https://youtu.be/QVoLbB5LAr4
Why did we start it?
Often enough I worked on my hardware projects while on the go. Traveling to clients, staying in hotel rooms, I missed a simple tool that allowed me to see what is going on, diagnose it and iterate on the go. I have also seen that problem in the other direction - most recently, I was hybrid-working on electric aircraft avionics, sometimes with the aircraft on the other side of the US. Frequently I had to call some on-site engineers to connect some instruments and screen-share, file-share, send screenshots, etc., to give me a glimpse of the elusive GPS-related bug I was hunting down.
What can FarProbe do today?
Bare minimum - we like to build in public and want to see where the community needs lead us!
You can use a logic analyzer locally, send a link to someone else to capture data for you remotely, you can run long-term acquisitions on our cloud - and export to PulseView for further analysis. You can also invite your colleagues to look at your issue without installing anything new.
How does it work?
It's a data-intensive WebUSB application written in Rust, both client and server-side. On Linux (Android, Chrome OS) and OSX, we are able to stream ~24MB/s, compress it (most of the time, the signal doesn't change) and send over to our servers. On Windows, we are limited to ~8MB/s, there is a bug in Chromium's WebUSB windows stack that we're thinking about a good way to resolve.
What do we want to do in the future?
Support more hardware (Oscilloscopes? Any favorite devices you really wished for had better software support?); Implement protocol decoders (also in the cloud); Implement device emulators and test fixtures.
Overall - we want to be the software company that gets hardware - and implements the companion software well.