Hi Today we're going to take a look at an interesting art series of logic analyzers from a company that I hadn't heard of before zero Plus, they're a Taiwanese company and they very kindly sent in a selection of their products. Now go check out their webpage I'll link it in down below and I'm actually amazed at the range of stuff that they've got. They've got like this: Arduino starter kit with their which they've sent in which I don't have price or any other details on I don't seem to doesn't seem to be available yet so I might leave that for a second video. We've got a low cost logic analyzer here called the Logic Cube or the Lap C series and this ranges anywhere from a hundred and thirty-five dollars for the bottom of the range unit which is cheap as up to nineteen hundred dollars for the top of the range unit depending on the memory configuration and the number of channels and stuff like that.

They've got about a half dozen models in between that at various price levels and they've got this F standard unit here which looks like it might be some USB hub thing, but it's actually not. uses USB 3 connections for the interface to the probes which we'll take a look at which is quite novel and this one goes. there's I think at least two models in this series are. It starts at $3,000 and goes up to $6,000 for top of the range unit for a 64 channel job.

Super high-speed super professional, and on top of that they got units which actually they do protocol analyzers as well. They do serial generators and stuff like that and they've even got 1e MMC memory analyzer system which is like $25,000 worth for professional design and analysis of E MMC memory used in computers and hard You know, cheap cheaper hard drives and cheaper interfaces and stuff like that. So you know they're really a wide range of tools. So we actually do tear downs and have a quick play around with these two here.

And as I said, I'll leave the Arduino starter kit for later. so let's get to it. 0 plus high quality professional instruments Taiwan Excellence Award I Guess 2009 They've been going for a long time and they'd want to for all the stuff that they've developed and here's the different models: I Believe that we've got this top of the range unit which is at $1,900 but as I said, the 16 channel art unit down here starts at a hundred and thirty-five dollars. so very affordable and I believe but have not checked this yet that they in 2016.

They say on their website that they are actually giving away all their protocol decoders for free and they have got a metric buttload of protocol decoders. It's absolutely incredible. I'll have to show you the list. it's one of the most comprehensive lists of our protocol decoders I've seen.

but yeah anyways from 135 bucks up to like you know but closer towards our to grand depending and let's have ask Wizard and I love the case. haven't even opened it yet and there's it's. a hundred and $29 optional pulse width trigger module as well so that's interesting. I'm not sure why they couldn't do that inside the unit inside presumably you're gonna find FPGAs inside all these doing all the heavy listing heavy lifting and these are while they are USB Logic analyzers They are not like like the cheap Sayle Logic for example.

these actually have built-in sample memories. so they're not streaming logic analyzers. So let's have a squiz at this. There it is.

It's our logic cube. so this is the 32 channel version, but you can get the 16 channel version. I Presume: There's just like an extra board in there with some extra hardware. So and the memory I Would presume that the memory is the same.

It's just software limited, but we won't know that until we take the thing apart. So we'll do a quick teardown. 500 milliamps so USB powered. It's got your standard point one inch art header or nicely color-coded that looks very nice.

We've just got a power button on the front and some let's and USB art 10.1 so we get a USB cable. we get the reckless that into like I'm just you know flying lead cables because these are not particularly are quick. We're talking about a seventy five megahertz bandwidth across all the models from the low end. one a hundred make samples for second hundred megahertz sample rate in timing analysis mode and I think 75 in state analysis mode and the top-of-the-range art.

One has two hundred megahertz sample rate and one hundred megahertz state analysis mode so you know look great for most you know generic uses for a logic analyzer and no problems whatsoever. And sample memory on these ranges from 32 k per channel for the bottom of the Ranger unit, hundred and one hundred and thirty-odd dollar unit, up to 2 Meg bits per channel for this top of the range 32 channel unit, which is the 32 mm for those playing along at home. so that's not a huge amount of memory. It's probably adequate for most general purpose use, but it does have sample compression as well up to 8 times so you can multiply it depending on the scenario of what you're actually measuring the signals you're measuring.

It can actually enable sample compression, which then in you know can multiply your memory by effectively up to 8 times. So I'm a big fan of logic analyzers that have both hardware memory like this and software compression based memory as well. You pretty much get the best of both worlds. The software compression is really handy when you have.

You're trying to measure things that have packets like spread very widely apart. You know you might have a packet which lasts for a microsecond of data. you want a sample and then it's only once every second. Well, you don't want to be pissing away your memory by sampling all those zeros so you can get sample rate compression.

So I Don't believe this compression on this is as good as other logic analyzers I've seen and they only claim up to eight times, but it's going to be handy. So what else are we got? We should have our requisite test flips in there. Yep, we've got our all our little color-coded easy hooks. Very nice.

We get our software software's what it's all about of course and some installation guide and whatnot because the thing with these logic analyzers, you know, for 130 bucks retail, there's not much in them. There's going to be like an FPGA and then a USB interface micro and some input front end to do the plus/minus six volts a trigger. It's got adjustable trigger threshold level from plus/minus 6 volts in like naught point, 1 volt steps or something like that. So I'll have a bit of circuitry for that, but there's not much in these things.

which is why the likes of say the Saleen logic analyzer. You can buy a clone on eBay for like 1/10 the price and you just download the software and boom, you can use it and they just can't stop people from doing that. and I Don't know if there's any clones of the zero pluses out there, but that's where all their money goes. It's not necessarily in the hardware, although that F-series that we'll have take a look at, it's probably some real decent high-end hardware in it, but something like this is not, you know, hasn't particularly got a lot of expensive hardware in it.

So it's all in the software. And trust me, as someone who has developed logic analyzer software and used to sell it my own one way back in the day, which I'm sure I showed in a video somewhere. Anyway, it's a lot of work, especially all the protocol decoding and everything else. So yeah, all the values in the software, not necessarily the hardware.

they you know, you almost give the hardware away. but but even though this hardware might be identical between the hundred and or not, huge amount difference between one hundred and thirty five dollar one In the eighteen hundred dollar one, you're paying for the number of channels and you're paying for, you know, the software. you pay for the software development basically. Anyway, let's crack it open and we're in like Flynn and there it is.

I'm not a huge amount of hardware, but that's very nice. I Like the look of that. They've got a nice little light pipes here to get from the LEDs up which are up here and guide the light up to the center of that. whoops.

The switch fell out and as you can see, they've got a Zero Plus branded chip in here now. I Doubt this is going to be a custom ASIC but you never know. but they've obviously had of it had it branded to their own chip. So what that one is? you know we're not gonna.

well. could we use the logic analyzer itself to probe its own clacker and figure out what that chip is? Anyway, I won't be doing that in this video, but we've obviously got some sort of USB interface chip here. and then we've got our sample memory up here. That'd be SRAM of course, turn on that.

DRAM Rubbish. Actually, this is very interesting. Look at presume that's a day code 29th week. Oh nine.

Um, is it an ASIC which they developed a long time ago? Or it may be like a custom Gatorade or something like that. perhaps? Um, maybe they have gone to that effort so that wouldn't be easy to clone really. So let's have a look here. We've got a LVT 16, 2, 4, 5.

So yep, that's how we input the logic buffer and this one over here is actually an FC T 2 4 5. So once again, that's just another eye transceiver. You may not be able to read that, but I've checked that under the mantas so we haven't found our comparator yet. And do we have a Cyprus SRAM there for those playing long at home and a USB interface chip? I'm not sure what that puppy is I'll have to look up that, but yeah, not a huge amount else.

Our comparators must be over here. have to take the label off and nope, we've got another identical LVT 16, 2, 4, 5 transceiver under there, so we've got two of those. and if we go over here I have no idea what that one is. can't find any info on that whatsoever.

So where's Wally Where is the logic level threshold comparators? This unit is supposed to have up to plus minus 6 volts selectable threshold for each channel while they do doing some sort of weird resistor summing thing going on here driving and then ERISA like I don't weird so they're definitely not doing in the probes because there are no probes. um, like it can't be doing it in the custom IC because that's on the other side of the transceiver over here. You've got to do it on the input side, but the transceivers. so I'm baffled as to how they're achieving that.

Hmm. Anyway, I may be expected like a second board in here for the extra 16 channel one, but this is like the 32 channel model. so I presume it's just a programming difference between. and maybe they've only populate all the passives and you know they only populate one of these or something like that for the 16 channel version.

but the Piece of Bear layouts likely to be absolutely identical between the two models. And once again, you might say yeah, that's a ripoff One's 135 bucks right at the bottom in the other ones like 1,800 bucks right at the top end. A bit. They've got to pay for all the software development.

That's just how it works. And this puppy right down in here is a microchip A-squared prom. So is that where they're storing the product configuration? or something like that? perhaps? Hmm. might be hackable I don't know good on your Pete version 1.0 B Um, hasn't been many changes I Guess Pete's good.

You got it right the first go and no surprises for finding. the pulse-width trigger module is just a lattice Asp mark P or D. So yeah, that's all it does this. They implement pulse triggering, so this is an optional thing.

I'm not sure how it plugs into your system because it doesn't plug into the logic analyzer. anyhow. so I guess you'd have to RTFM read the freaking manual for that one. Aha, there you go.

It does actually hook into the this side of it. Is that like a dedicated interface for something like that? Hmm. But obviously there was a customer need for a pulse with the pulse width trigger module. They couldn't do it in their ASIC or whatever it was, so they had to develop a little external doodad to do it.

But anyway, that's not a USB logic analyzer. This is a USB logic analyzer. As I said I Believe it starts at 3 grand, but we have the This is the F standard series. This is the fully optioned up 64 channel version.

The Lap F 164 channel. so USB 3 interface requires a fair bit of grunt not in volts at five point five amps. Thank you very much And let's have a look on the side here. We've got our USB R3, but it's It's basically not designed to stream it is.

it's got hardware, memory building, capture memory, all that sort of stuff. It's not a USB streaming, but you acquire so much data and you want to get it out quick. You can do that, but it look it's got a little micro USB clock out a stack. whatever that is that.

Oh no. I have to read the manual and clock in and DC a couple of fans. where are they? Yeah, a couple of fans on the other end because it it's probably going to get a bit warm inside this puppy and look, they actually use USB 3 as the probe interface. Let me show you the probes and it's got trigger out for a going to you know, system integration and other sorts of stuff.

Let me provide you a nice looking BNC cable. Sweet! Now check out what you get. In fact, that's not all of it. You get a squillion.

well 64 I guess I'm us little micro USB 3 cable so standard USB 3 2 micro USB 3 a little tiny short ones nice and they're all like color-coded so that you can I get the different channels sweet I like that and check out what we've got in all of this. we've got our easy hooks of course, but these we have once again, 64 of these, all color-coded We have curiously. look at this. this is our micro USB 3.

We've got a little trimmer pot in there tweaking the compensation of this thing you know, hold your tongue at the right angle and compensate the probe I Don't know what the extra two pins out there is for. Maybe that's to go off to it. It's the same as the input. Anyway, we've got the standard twisted pair input.

Now the thing with this is that is when you're designing a system that you know you got it like a real complex digital system. you know you're going to have to debug it with a logic analyzer protocol decoder. You don't have to. You know, like debug all the memory system and everything else.

You won't jump to the final prototype you might find, jump to the final product version of your PCB or you might. but you'll also design a version of your PCB that has a whole bunch of these point one inch and breakout headers usually right around the chip that you want a debug. So the chip will be there and you'll have a whole bunch of headers surrounding that so that the during debug and that will be a special debug version of the boy special development version of your product. PCB We just go around and plug in your 64 channels right around your memory chip where your processor or whatever it is you're trying to debug.

So anyway, um, that's rather interesting. It's a little bit. how are you doing in terms of the headshrinker a little bit? Do it yourself. It not hugely er professional.

I Don't know why they just didn't. You know they make it enough of these things. Don't know why they just didn't moldy like a custom little case that wouldn't have cost much to enclose that. But anyway, they've gone for the heatsink heat shrink solution, so we'll cut one of those off and have a look.

But these are the probes. So they use the USB three of course to go over to the unit and there's nothing wrong with that that's not actually USB This won't be a USB interface. They're just using the USB 3 cable for its side ubiquitousness. Its cheapness.

It's controlled impedance. everything else for high-speed differential pair. So that's basically what they're using the thing for. They're probably transferring some power over as well for doing this.

So USB 3. It was actually a smart choice there, so we'll just step this puppy open and see what she has to offer in there. We can see the decoupling caps on the bottom side here, and I'm a fan of the heat shrink our construction over boards like this, but for a 3,000 to 6,000 dollar logic analyzer, you expect a case. I mean I Didn't expect to see that.

There we go. Oh, they put the strain relief either side of the piece either blobbed it, they've blobbed it. Oh, look at that. How rude.

We've been slimed. Um, yeah, so we just won't know what's under there. Anyway, it's obviously got to our power and you can see the differential pair. These are all like individual wah channels, so the differential pair carries the data and then they'd be using the power pins to pair all that the compensation trimmer resistor there.

And that's about all she wrote. It's a huge amount on there, some decoupling on the bottom. so whether or not that's some sort of, you know custom front in solution I Don't know because this one has a one gig or it's one gig sample rate: I Think so. this one is like this logic analyzer is serious business.

So yeah, anyway, this looks and feels like a serious bit of kit. so let's crack it open. You're right. let's take this sucker off.

I Think it's going to lift? We're gonna lift off. Tada. We're in like Flynn and there it is. Whoa, Isn't that nice Wow Getting your money's worth.

Oh, look at that. RFI gasket right across the top. There isn't that beautiful spongy RFI gasket sealing down the top of the top of the USB connectors right through to the front panel to stop the yeah, all the little electrons escaping. Beautiful! So this one's actually a 2015 design by the looks of it.

or at least the last revision was which is quite a much more recently other one which dates from the 2000s. Um, so as we've seen common in these sorts of products like this is three thousand dollars or six thousand dollars depending on which configuration might even be more for our higher-end one. You don't and you're not manufacturing the hardware in high volume. You just don't worry about costing these sort of things.

So once again, you find that they've used these little expensive power bricks. These are not cheap. You know they've got I know, five or ten bucks a pop or something or even more. You know if you buy from Digi-key like 20 bucks a pop? Little are these the TI ones or the linear technology ones? But anyway, Little Dc-to-dc can power a power bricks you know, designed to do all the voltage rails for the you know, the variously FPGA and other logic.

And they've got no less than two, four, six, eight, nine of those inside this. So yeah, I spared no expense. I Check out the check out the PTC there on the input. Oh wow, that's serious business.

Look at that. So the designer just went up bugger this. We want to protect that what's marked as a fuse so it might be one of those solid-state resettable wire fuses. Is it marked? Yes, it is.

They clearly just went off by God I'm sticking in the biggest baddest eyes One I can fit in their beauty. She'll be right now. Interestingly, there's a bunch of our unpopulated connectors. There's a point one each header up there.

Maybe some debug development programming slash interface, but look at all these little SMA coax connectors along there. I wonder what they're for? Hmm. and for the massive amount of sample memory, they've gone for an off-the-shelf uh, what does that? Ddr3 1600? There we go. Well that you know, it makes sense because this thing is one gig sample per second sample rate.

So yeah, what a beast. Well, the rest of it. There's not a huge amount of you know, extra stuff in here. We've got our USB er three interface for those playing along at home.

Not sure what that one is. can you read it? I don't know. Not too entirely fussed about that, but yeah. I mean you don't need any of the transceivers on here or anything like that.

You don't need the logic level threshold comparators or anything like that because it's simply receiving a twisted pair signal. That's all done in the probe. You receive a twisted pair signal on each of the USB connectors and Bob's your uncle. But there's a whole bunch of dead switches in there and it doesn't seem to be one per channel.

So there's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, others, eight of them. Okay, so maybe some sort of bank configuration or something doing I Don't know. but yeah, it's basically all the twisted pairs are just going to flow into this badass beastie over here, which is going to be once again, some sort of custom FPGA or a custom Gatorade or ASIC slash FPGA. Anyway, certainly I can't fault that.

Hardware It's very, very nicely designed and laid out. Let's check the bottom. It don't seem to expect anything. no just your regular bypass cap passes.

There's a couple of others over here to do with whatnot I don't know logic level transceivers? perhaps that just about it. But yeah, what? That main beastie is there I'm going to have to clip off that heatsink, but there's nothing else there. All the differential pairs I can't see the trace is running on the bottom, can't see them running. Of course they're not running on the top, so they're running on an inner layer of the PCB Once again, super duper high speed controlled impedance all the way with LBJ and internal ground planes, so that could be a six or eight layer board.

Ah, got jars eye links Kintex seven. oh that's a beastie. How much is that worth? Puppy's going to be at least a couple hundred bucks. That's a bit of a beast, but there you go.

This is like a classic use case for like a high-end FPGA Like this side context one because it's got the transceivers built-in for the UM For the you know, the differential pair serial. it's got the Surdas decoders build in the serial decoders. Essentially, it's got the high speed logic stuff. It's got built-in memory as well for any sort of vocation or anything like that that needs to be done and it can do of course, all the processing that's an FPGA.

You can get it to do anything you want. You wouldn't be rolling your own ASIC for something like this. unless you are looking at really high volume and something like this like a three or six six thousand logic analyzer. You're not going to be selling them in the hundreds of thousands.

You know you're going to be selling them in the hundreds thousands if you're lucky. So what they're gonna be implementing in there, of course, is serial straight in so the 32 or 64 channel. What serial differential pair straight into the Saudis and then into the logic array where they're going to be implementing hard serial decoder functions. Decoder hard serial trigger because you can trigger off various whole slew of different protocols so that'll be programmed in there.

All your serial decoding. You can all do that in hardware because it's all running in parallel on an FPGA so that's the beauty of that. And yeah, I Would have been surprised to see a custom ASIC on this puppy. although I'm pretty much convinced that the one on the lower end the logic clue cube that we saw I think that's a custom ASIC which they did way way back because the company mention stuff about designing their own chips for various products.

that's like in the company history part of thing. but for something like this year, you wouldn't? You just whack a Kintex in there and Bob's your uncle, So that's certainly some decent hardware in this. I'm quite professional, as you'd expect from the price tag. This company's been going like 10 plus years or something like that.

so they know their logic analyzer and they pretty much specialize in this sort of stuff protocol decode, and everything else. But yeah, as good as the hardware is, it's only as good as the software, not only for the protocol decoding built into here, but also the software that runs on the PC which lets you display it and do all the time in and state analysis and and protocol, our decoding and everything else. I Though this would have protocol decoded built in, it had only be for the purposes of trigger I Believe it wouldn't be like they would be doing that. Maybe sucking the data out and then to doing the full memory decoding I would presume in the software on the PC, but you definitely want protocol triggering in the hardware.

it's useless. If you're doing a PC, you're gonna wait until it streams to the PC First, Use a PC to decode it and forget it. Yeah, you know your dad has already flow enough by the time your PC triggers that, so it was all. protocol triggering hardware is all done in there.

That's a sweet bit of kit now. I Won't be hooking it up and playing around with this, but here's this: Arduino Starter kit with logic analyzers. It's got like a cut-down version of the logic cube where ever seen and look at the little ring binder up menu I Haven't put it in a ring binder yet but I haven't had a look. It's got all these experiments.

Wow Wow All is glossy cards. This is oh yeah, double-sided. This is brilliant. Wow This is very impressing.

So yeah. I Couldn't find a price or where this was available from real life applications. This looks really jazzy. Wow They've put a lot of work into that.

That's very impressive. So let's have a quick squeeze inside the box shall we? Tada look at this. That's what you get inside for those playing along at home. So you get you get spread board yet? What is that? Oh I Squared C RGB Interface Nice.

I've got a USB interface. We've got a microphone preamp but looks like we've got have a motor to make something spin and let's get that out of there. You get your Arduino Uno Of course looks like a genuine one. Yeah yeah, reckless an LCD A couple of little looks like it's an 8 channel logic analyzer.

a little 2 0 + cute The educator, the lap educator. So they've done just a cut-down version of that Wow that is and all the requisite probes and USB cables. That's fantastic if you're after a kid with a a like a digital experiment as kid with a building not logic analyzer that I'm an you won't play around with Arduino Is that gonna be really good depending on the cost of that? but that's thoroughly impressive Wow Well done 0 plus and well done Alberto peg ante and David Anton Shan says then Shannon says Sanchez got it? Bring me at work. All right, let's take a look at the software for the logic cube, shall we? I Downloaded this from the website and it turns out that it wasn't the latest version from the website when I ran it and install it installed.

No problems USB Drive and no problems whatsoever. But then it told me I was way out of date and here's the latest one: I Downloaded a zip file and I had to manually go to it. Not impressed that my first impression is that no, it's a bit old school and clunky. It's actually designed only for way up to Windows 2007 it says so you know like what do you say about that And here's the version that I'm playing with are 3.14 point Oh - but yeah, they just seems to be a lack of I Mean, look at Copyright 1997 - 2017.

So it it gives me I Get the impression that it is from 2007. They haven't put any mod cons into this thing. Now let's you know you've got all your basic stuff up here. Okay, you got your sample rate.

You've got your memory size here. you've got you pre and post trigger control. So by default, 50% pretreat your 50% post trigger and all that sort of stuff. Okay, but have a look at the waveforms.

look I haven't actually set up anything but like the first thing I notice is like I can't drag these waveforms around I can't do anything like that Now let's actually treat well actually. Whoops, No. oh what I'll do is like I don't mind this. Of course you can set the trigger up on each channel to positive, negative, positive, negative, slope, or either slope stuff like that.

So I don't mind that at all. So we'll set that to either slope here and I will run it. so it's going to sit there and let me generate a signal. I've actually got the digital and analog discovery feeding in some signals here.

so I'll feed in Aur signal Here we go-oh generate that boom and we're in like Flynn But look, I mean we've got this site navigator window down the bottom here now. The software is actually pretty basic. One of the frustrating things I encountered first is that I couldn't just like drag the waveforms around like back and forth like hold down the button, hold down either button and just drag them around I Had to figure out that you had to do the hand tool up here. you know I've got to select the tool and then it's not very responsive.

it's a bit jerky. and yes, I can zoom in and zoom out with the control key like this and you can then see the there you go. You can see the Navigator window on scroll. that's a bit smoother so the functionalities there, but it's pretty basic and in the manual it shows that it has timing measurements between.

you know it'll show you how long this was low for for example, this pulse here, but it's not popping up with any of that, you know. Really cool stuff by default or anything like that. you can go in here and you can. The menus are a little bit cryptic until you get used to, but channel assignment is fairly obvious.

I can go in there and type that I've changed it to UART and we could have this one as a clock for example or something like that. so we change that. but I can't drag, just grab them with the mouse and like to rag the order of them. I mean that's just like you know? that's like bread and butter 101 for logic analyzer.

playing around and setting up your waveforms and and stuff like that. But yeah. anyway. it just it feels dated.

It feels like it is from the 2000s and they haven't really updated the interface. but it does look very powerful. Have no idea what singled and what? MSO is single DSO channel what? DC couple. What does it actually have an oscilloscope function? No know what's going on.

so that's really quirky. I have no idea what is going on there at all I can't do it. What are these lines? I've got no idea. closed ear, so analog.

that is really weird. Look trigger what? what's OPB It's just. it's really quiet, it's really quite strange, and it's reset. When I change that mode, it's reset my waveform.

Geez, its reset. Everything has it. Ah it. Yeah, it's not intuitive.

It's not nicely polished. It's just pretty frustrating to use. like like straight off the bat. I'm sure you'd get used to it, but but no, the vibe I'm getting is just it.

Yeah, it's just not great. not great. Look I can't even expand that window. Can I know I can I can delete channels I can go in there and sort of delete I can't do you wish to delete it? Yeah, just freaking to lead it.

Don't ask me like I can highlight those and I can delete those to get rid of them. Yeah, okay, but I don't know I'm just not feeling it and I'm not sure if there's any way to change the color of the waveforms either. like I know what they do. You know different colors have different Simon's on them.

They probably match the colour coding on the thing, but I don't know. like I just find that red. just the red on the black. Kind of hard to see.

So yeah. Anyway, now this signal filter stuff here. This is kind of interesting if you read the manual it it basically says filter and is used to increase the record length by only storing samples when certain unit you user-defined see girls are high or low, so you know it's very powerful. but it's certainly something that could confuse a first-time user that's for sure.

But hey, you don't have to use it if you don't want it. but if you accidentally clicked on that, you know you could be in for a world of hurt. Now one thing I don't get I care is we've got this window down here which doesn't really match up to the display window at the top. I mean look, you know, like there it is, right? it's clear.

look where we're right on the last pulse there. but we can see all those pulses in there where we're in the center. like that it takes up most of the frame. but up here we've got all this dead space like what? Um, that's just that just doesn't even work properly.

I Don't know what the deal is there. That's just it's hopeless. And then these numbers are long here. Like you know, Twelve thousand, eight hundred and thirty seven.

What? Like, is it microseconds? milliseconds? samples? What? like they're where's the units? Nothing there that tells you anything. So it actually took me ages to figure out how to do this serial decoding in this software. It's not obvious if you go up here like acquisition. no, nothing doing their analysis that surely no nothing doing their view.

no nothing doing their did MSI's didn't know that is as an optional product or something. But look what we need to do is we need to go in, you our tier and then channel assignments. It's not this one, but it's like ad bus slash signal. But this is not where you add a bus.

We have to actually sign a bus. which okay we need to group in the bus here. So bingo. And now we're starting to get there and you can group various signals so you we could have like selected all three of those.

like if we had a spy bus for example and then we could group those unbel we can. Yeah if we did before we can group those indoor bus. So now let's try and get this to decode a you are and only then if we right-click on the bus do we get bus properties, protocol decoders. Thanks for telling us that here we go and this is where it gets impressive because look at all I mean this is that you can get the hundred and thirty nine dollar version of this I Believe And and the software is same.

you get all of these one wire, seven-segment LED Module AC 97 like this is just can to CCIR compact flash CMOS Image Wow is that like CMOS camera but like look at all that Das 1302 and that's the RTC isn't it? I believe I don't think it has a MMC I think you have to look up the list but it supports most of these I Believe So all different I squared C's I RDA or I are modules. infrared decoding, key lock, code hopping stuff. This is absolutely incredible I Believe You get most if not all of these decoders with like the bottom of the range 130 you know, 140 dollar unit. So if you're just looking for a serial decoder, this could be the bomb for you know, not much dosh at all.

Anyway, we want to go in there and select our UART Bingo! We're in like Flynn and and obviously we haven't set that up properly yet. so we're going to go in there and select our configuration. All right. So let's go in.

Everything's right here. 9600, 8 data bits, one-stop beard, etc. no parity. The packet oh that's nice.

We can set up look at the color for all that sort of stuff. so it's Jesse and data format. Bingo. That's what we want.

Binary decimal, hexadecimal, we want ASCII Beautiful and use you out for free because they released all the decoders for free, which is fantastic. So this should now decode this hopefully. Oh, come on, it's like it's just quirky that you have to go through that extra menu. Hello World! There we go.

Okay, we'll send that again. Let's capture. it's sitting there triggering it. Probably shouldn't delete those waveforms when you trigger, probably to show you I yeah, I don't know.

that's a personal preference thing. Anyway, send data bingo eevblog nice and check this out like there's just no spit-and-polish at all on these fonts up here. they just look overlaid on the waveform. It's just ah no, no, it's just clunky.

There is one thing I do like though is that when you do select the bus and you go back out, it's annoying that Odin doesn't when you go back out and save it that it actually changes the channel names for you or puts data s o'clock and SS the Select line there. so that's you know. kind of handy. You don't have to go in and do that manually.

Nice touch. It's the only nice touch. I See on the hunt so far t Don't tell you what, it don't seem to have everything you need here. It has all the different modes in the transmission direction and the data length and you can do a virtual are select as well after a time period.

and I think that's pretty much comprehensive for SPI bus for example. And sure enough, if I do an SPI bus and execute I'm writing ie. as the command so you can see that there's two down here. That's the command and I'm writing a a hex that is correct and I'm right in the next data as one one hex so that is correct.

No problems whatsoever. Yeah, check it out. It just doesn't like format this font properly. look.

it can hang off the end and it can vanish like that and give you that result. And it's just it's there's no spit and polish in the way that data is actually presented. It's not the font size and everything is not scale properly. That's pretty annoying.

I expected better. But if your go into some of the other protocol decoders like USB 2.0 for example, look here's all the stuff that it actually decodes. Fantastic! And yeah, it's free. Use USB 2 for free and we can cancel out of that.

Let's choose something else. What are we got here? Something that's good, Maybe are and maybe wanted people want to muck around with Sm Bus for example. once again, it's all free. All these decoders all included.

Fantastic! So again, I have not seen a more comprehensive list of product holes decoders than this one. It's just absolutely remarkable. And I believe you can get this for the 135 buck unit and check it out. It looks like we can even do like SD card decoding and stuff like that for the Packer for the for the actual SD card protocol.

Like brilliant. What are the logic analyzer does All this? none. but of course, right out of the block Here we can drag the cursors across like this and and do stuff like that, but there's no snap in, you know, to an edge or anything like that. You know, no small spit-and-polish like that at all.

and well. okay. a minus B is 751. What samples? I'm presuming: are you kidding me? like tell me what that is in microseconds time I Like that it's capable of doing it I'm sure.

but I have to select some sort of freaking timing analysis mode or something. It's just guy. Give me a break and it's so frustrating. Like out of the box you.

you want to be able to just you know. check the frequency of this clock for example, on it or any way you can do while different views like a state list for example. you can get that so you know. Great for you list aficionados.

Hi Here we go look at this bugger reading the manual. Look. we've got a time display. Hello There we go.

Look. Look at the size of these fonts. They're all over the place. What when? What is that information measuring? Are you like? What? are they? 31.8 to five milliseconds from where to where? Like what? I Don't understand what? That is? Just a mess isn't It makes no sense whatsoever.

Wow Like they've been doing this for so long. And okay, so that's the sampling. the sample number frequency display. There we go.

31 Point: 3 to 3 Hertz But like show like little arrows on there that it's it's detecting the right frequency. That's just that's nuts like that that is. I Do not understand what the hell is going on there. That's terrible Muriel really hard time of waveform like oh no no no no no no This is how not to do logic analyzer software.

Ah, here we go. Only if we like zoom in to this look. does it actually put a hundred microseconds between there and there. That is the ugliest thing I've ever seen.

This is like beater software or something. This this is that. like maybe you can change the font size or something, but it should automatically doing that. That is terrible.

Ah no. like otherwise ridiculously powerful software just ruined by spit and polish on the user interface. That what a shame. Absolute shame.

But yeah, they need somebody who knows how to do a GUI interface please. And it looks like we've got a packet list display as well, so that's okay. And of course the list view. But yeah, it does have a find capability.

Are there there? It is fine I Found it data value Oh It disappeared off screen. So you can actually search through and find stuff so that's handy. Oh look. I Just noticed you can connect multiple lap sees.

Okay, um RTFM for that one I Guess you can like all those extra. Yeah, they've got various other extra pins on the connector there to allow you to connect multiple ones together to form a larger number of channels. Brilliant and connected. DSO Well, I didn't see on their web page a dear.

So so I'm not sure what's going on there why you would even enable that like the single Dear so you know double. D So when it knows that there's no dear so connected, like why even have that as an option? Hmm I Don't know. Sure enough, you go Aquos Treeger properties. You can actually set up the level user-defined You can set up like not 0.1 volts or something like that.

so they're doing that somehow. It's kind of weird. Anyway, you can set up the threshold levels based on a port, so they might have something in there which may be a DAC in there which drives the voltage pin the power pin on the level. our chips I Think maybe that's how they might be doing it.

Yeah, based on the various ports. So anyway, you can't actually do it. Now let's have a look at the software for the F-series This is a multi-thousand dollar logic analyzer and yes, it is different software. So ah, now we can actually look.

We can drag these around. Isn't that neat? Can we even expand them? Look? can we? Yeah, we could look at that. We can expand it exactly what you wanted from the last one, so it looks a bit jazzy. but once again, there are just like it is not polished at all.

Look if I expand this window. I've got three monitors set up here so this is actually on my secondary window which I capture on and if I try to go fullscreen, it just jumped over to my like my main desktop screen. It can't even state like it can't even expand to the full screen. I mean they've completed out a file and got wanky dials over here.

By the way, the minimum sample rate on this puppy is five megahertz, so if you want to go under that I think you're out a lot. So this one's actually nicer in that you can right click over here at add protocol Dakota Okay, that's a bit neater, but let's go up here. We can actually select our trigger, our probe type. so we actually this is quite troublesome.

It hasn't I've got a P 200 probe. It doesn't even support the probes they've supplied. What the? So that is just crazy I'm not sure what's going on there. I've got the P 200 am probes and they're just not in the list at all.

Anyway, you can see how down here: I have actually done my pack MIUI packet down here and captured a but look at this spurious data either side here. So I presume that's because the probe is set up incorrectly. Okay, but anyway we have the same thing going on here I can't even oh I can hold down control but it doesn't seem to work all the time. I've had issue with this ad s where it did not work before holding down control and then doing that.

but our anyway so why is a zero and a what? why are there? oh oh okay maybe a one is the other connection on ah okay no sorry anyone might be the other connection on that probe. that other to pin header maybe that we saw on there. So something weird is like I I don't know I don't know I we come on no I won't I won't delete that. Anyway, here's our serial data.

We certainly got it. although not sure that spurious thing there is. Check that out and once again I can't just grab this left, click and pan around. It's just like ridiculously frustrating.

Where is the hand thing that we had on the previous version? It's just like no fail absolute no. So anyway, we're spurious data, but that could be could be because of the probe setup. So anyway, the software is different. You can actually set up protocol decode in so this is a bit nicer interface I Do like this.

It's a wizard. Fantastic. So look at all the protocols you've got. I mean I see interfaces that's just a JTAG it's got everything.

Um, unbeli. look at the digital audio ones HDMI Wow that's just Aa MIDI Mipi crazy I don't know what the JK logic thing is basic logic application I don't know, is it something demo thing I think sample application I don't know but complex flash II MMC and this is just so like a P.m. bus all your various buses. you infrared stuff your IRDA NEC Philips protocols wireless protocols the key lock logger.

Again, it's just incredible. The amount of decoders you get with this. absolutely stunning. Okay, so when you do that, it actually adds the separate UART bus here.

witching and actually up. Can you expand that? Does it Let you? Yes, it does. There we go. Nice.

So this actually works slightly differently. It's not the bus decoder properties in here. We're in hex at the moment so we can't actually change it in there. Unlike the previous software, we've actually going to go into numeric base encode in and we go to ASCII and Ee-vie Oh Trust me, it will if I can zoom a hike I'm holding down control and now it's going vertical like do I have to actually select the act I have to select the axes? All right No.

I I don't know. Anyway, Eevblog there it is. Um, but you know once again, it's not formatting the data. and like the the text.

maybe it's a little bit better, but where's this one? I Wanted to go I'll show you over here this state list. Look at this. the state list. All the fonts are chopped off like what this is like a multi-thousand dollar logic analyzer.

and this software is just so unpolished it's a real shame. It's a real shame really. The main thing this software has going for it is the serial wire protocol. the free serial protocol decoding because everything else is just so clunky.

Anyway, I'm sure it's like ridiculously powerful if you actually went in there and had a look at it with a signal. noise, filters, math operations, farc attack. was it like I'm sure it will eventually do the business, but just driving this thing is just no. no.

get. somebody knows how to do a decent GUI for goodness sake. And if we actually go into options over here, then we can find our waveform. And once again, they got the silly frequency number of samples.

Time. don't show values. Wake up when you put your cursor over it automatically like a left click or something. Or automatically say you know a button up here which says like Auto cursor mode or something.

You automatically tells you the frequency, the time period between there and all sorts of stuff like that. Anyway, yeah, so let's go, let's go time and we're in. Hang on. Ah, that one's a little bit more polished.

Is it slightly more polished? At least it's not overhanging. But once again, no font size scaling. So yeah, it's just really amateur hour. And once again, it looks like we have no ability to snap curses or anything like that like real basic stuff.

Aha I stand corrected on the probes. Sorry I goofed that up completely. They did actually include in the packet some 120 LV probes which are in here. Now here's an example: I know I thought I had it where it didn't do the protocol decode it anyway.

the same window thing like in the other software. look, look, it's got extra space at the end. It just doesn't render that preview window correctly. That's just nuts.

Anyway, I've got the 120 LV Pro which is the low voltage CMOS probe and it's got two channels. The Pro Bowl was using before is actually the Emmc probes, so that was entirely different. designed for probing an entirely MMC signals. So I've now got the regular arm that will regular low-voltage just CMOS TT le type.

They do have a TTL probes specifically, but you have to get the specific type and this is a two channel. so there's a. There's a 32 ports on the unit itself 32 USB ports and you can get up to 64 channels because each probe supports 2 depending on what you're probing. So there you go.

I resampled it and now we don't get any other crazy data so that's just fine. So yep, sorry about that Evie Blue, that's correct. What? Why do you have to put data like why does that word data have to be there? Why? it's just totally redundant. So anyway, that's how you look at the Zero plus logic analyzers.

and well like the Hyatt Like the hardware is really good. the software I it's it's almost a fail it like it's gonna do the business but it's just it's just not polished at all. Which is a real shame because this probably has the most serial decoders of any logic analyzer that I've used. So I yeah.

but anyway, if you can get like this one for what is it? the 1616 or something for like a hundred and thirty bucks and get all those serial decoders, that could be very, very useful. Very well worth checking out. and you can see that they've got protocol analyzers as well. Oh, what's I squared? C SPI Control Center I wonder geez, all sorts of stuff.

The websites a bit weird, but anyway. hmm and we have to do the starter kit in another in Software Control I Squid CSPI Control Center Oh, this is this this generator I think it might be the protocol generator and no. anyway, weird. all sorts of stuff.

Anyway, thank you very much Zero Plus for sending those in. A lot more work on the software required. Please just would make the experience a heck of a lot better cuz your hardware seems to be quite a reasonable anyway. I hope you found that interesting.

If you did, please give it a big thumbs up. And as always, comment down below: catch next time. sorry about my voice by the way I'm just sick as a dog at the moment. Ah can I go over, lie down on the beanbag, catch you next time you.