Bus Pirate 5 Firmware | Hacker News Reader

Bus Pirate 5 Firmware

firmware.buspirate.com

46 pointsunwind37 comments

[tangental] two accounts created 3 days ago stating how wonderful the bus pirate is?

Cmon, surely you know better than this. And the BP is a great tool, it doesn’t need painfully obvious astroturfing

Uh? Not sure if you meant me (I submitted this instance) but my account is slightly older. I feel like a low-key but established member of this here bunch o' geeks.

Probably talking about the two comments by amberburch399 and amrelisteelsco (green accounts).

Sorry definitely not you, but exactly what seritools mentioned. When I first saw this post they had already posted

Horrible web site. Is it even affiliated with dangerousprototypes.com?

No mention of bus pirate 5 there.

I had the same reaction. There is a blog post that mentions iand from dangerous prototypes is involved. There are posts from Dangerous prototypes on Twitter discussing the board. It seems like a case of focusing on the hardware instead of the marketing.

https://buspirate.com/coming-soon/

https://twitter.com/dangerousproto

Looks like a ripoff with the "DANGER Prototyping In Progress" logo. A forum with only one poster, text that reads like it's AI-generated...

Ian has said the old 15-year-old site is so archaic he didn't want to work with it anymore. And buspirate.com is a better domain name. The web site has a lot of information on it. I spend an hour reading about the new development on Bus Pirate. For instance, the section on test probes was very interesting.

You can buy prototypes from dirtypcbs.com (Dangerous Prototypes outlet)

Bys pirate is aweaome, Ian is an allround great guy, and dirtypcbs is my goto source of borderline poisonous hardware.

With that said, to best of my knowledge that is not their site and there is no bus pirate 5:

http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Bus_Pirate

The Bus Pirate 5 (Preview version) is real and available for sale on the DirtyPCB's site - (same price as the V3) with the caveat that this is a beta and may not be the final version https://dirtypcbs.com/store/designer/details/ian/6621/bus-pi...

For those who are new to it, and somewhat confused: https://hardware.buspirate.com/introduction

I am still confused. What is a typical use case?

This page gives a better introduction: http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Bus_Pirate

Basically a tool to interface with whatever IC you might have. Flexible input supporting many protocols, just hook it up to a random chip or serial debug pins on a board you are reverse-engineering and you can figure out the signal mapping and protocol decoding in software.

Piggybacking on that question, could I use this to interrogate a device over rs485 and reverse engineer the protocol it speaks? In particular, a pool heater and a variable speed pool pump

Yes, but you would still need to convert the differential signals to UART with appropriate voltage levels. A RS-485 to USB adapter might be the better option here. But a buspirate has way more usability than just UART, it's awesome for some quick i2C or SPI experimentation

Ah, so Bus Pirate wouldn't help me trigger or decode the messages? My biggest problem is that I don't have the automation system which is expected to talk to the devices, so I'm at a loss as to how I'd even get communication started for me to look at what's going over the wire.

It can be used as a TTL serial adapter (ex getting a command line on common hardware/IoT devices), JTAG (debug, dump firmware), reading flash memory chips, etc

If you care for such things, you can use the Bus Pirate to see the speed of your code .. I have a macro I can wrap any function in, and by way of GPIO toggles, see on my bus pirate/logic analyzer, how many milliseconds/nanoseconds certain functions take to execute .. its also quite useful for getting a console - I have loaned my BP to a friend, who used it to reset his electric mopeds firmware ..

Hopefully the firmware development won't stall like it was with v4.

Rp2040 is a decent choice for relatively slow speed digital bus multi-tool, but the USB1.1 speeds will be somewhat limiting (IIRC I achieved somewhere around 700-800KB/s of serial data throughput). PIO is also flexible enough for some almost standard-but-nonstandard digital buses (for example, I used it to interface with 12-bit SPI-like interface- not many MCUs support word-widths that are not multiple of 8 for their hardware SPI interfaces).

I think it was the case that they were just running out of memory to stuff new features in and gave up on it. If so, the RP2040 will give a lot more room for this.

I have a V3 and it is a neat little tool. What isn't clear to me yet is what V5 will sell for. V3 was very cheap but this one has a display and some LEDs that will likely increase the price. Hopefully that increase isn't a big one.

I gotta say though that the RP2040 is a game changer. It is popping up all over the place, from Bus Pirates to Switch mod chips. PIO, good docs, low price, and readily available is a solid combo of features.

I'm an electronics hobbyist and was already roughly aware of the Bus Pirate, but this website does nothing to explain why I'd want to buy one. The website for the earlier version is much more useful: http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Bus_Pirate

Glasgow revC is supposedly gearing up to ship soon. Seems like a slightly-more-featureful near-peer to this. https://www.crowdsupply.com/1bitsquared/glasgow

The thing I love about the Bus Pirate is that you don't need to install any software to use it. Just connect to the serial port. The Glasgow is cool as hell but you have to use Python and to really master it you have to master Amaranth HDL to make use of the FPGA.

I bought a bus pirate years back, at the time it was advertised as open source, i took that to mean cross platform, which it wasn't. it's windows only, the associated apps only run there. you can do a lot in a usb terminal, but i abandoned it. in short, don't buy it unless you run windoze.

I've used bus pirates years back and always under Linux or macOS. Not sure what you are referring to.

yeah me too

Not sure what you are referring to, but the main buspirate interface was a serial console. It works just fine under the Linux OSX and windows.

App? What app??

You connect to it over USB/uart and enter commands manually.

There are some 3rd party apps that can interface to it, but I belive the big one is in fact open source

What?

I’ve used the Bus Pirate exclusively under Linux for years to do hardware hacking stuff.

Is there a clicky shiny windows app for it?

You must be confused.

whats with all the ai images on this damn site. Makes it feel like a scam.

I think it might be. It's apparently not the real website for Bus Pirate, if you read sibling comments.

It's astonishing how much can be achieved with a tool like Bus Pirate.

Can you go into details? do you have any examples?

Debugging, prototyping, hacking, and reverse engineering electronics. There are many other boards, such as the Tigard, Bruschetta Board, GreatFET, Glasgow, and many other boards. Most of them are FT2232H and FT232 based boards - which wrap the chip with level shifters, switches and interfaces.

This really enhances the Bus Pirate's versatility, making it even more valuable for hardware debugging. What are your thoughts on future add-ons?

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