Bus Pirate Preorders Open

buspirate

Update, Saturday July 4th, 2009: All preorders are closed.

We’re excited to announce our partnership with the folks at Seeed Studio (home of the excellent Seeeduino) to put the Bus Pirate v2go into production! The preorder period ends July 3rd. The price is $30 including worldwide shipping. The board pictured above is a hand soldered prototype, but the ones sold by Seeed are completely factory assembled.

This is the first officially produced piece of Hack a Day hardware. Depending on its success, we’ll be able to put many future designs into production. Read more about the Bus Pirate in our latest How-to. Thank you for your support!

***Update, Monday June 29, 2009: Wow, your support has been overwhelming! Thank you! There have been more orders for the Bus Pirate than we ever imagined. As of this update, there’s a few (12) Bus Pirates left in the Seeed preorder. After that, we’ve exhausted the supply of PIC24FJ64GA002s available in Shenzhen. If you’ve already placed your order nothing changes, the manufacturing process has already begun and your Bus Pirate will ship ASAP.

After the first preorder is filled, Seeed will start a new preorder. The second preorder will be delayed until more PIC24FJ64GA002s are delivered, about 4 to 6 weeks. This order should ship about 6 to 8 weeks after July 3, 2009, but we’ll try our best to get it out sooner. Thank you again for your support!

45 thoughts on “Bus Pirate Preorders Open

  1. Wow, I usually just check the site to get ideas, so I didn’t know this was coming. I am really excited about this, and about the price, what a deal! I can’t wait to get one.

  2. awesomesauce, ever since you first published v1 I’ve been wanting one, but as an avr person I’ve never had the time or the motivation to get a pic board working, thanks :D…and bought

  3. FTDI has extensive driver support for most platforms, we used the virtual com port drivers. Use your favorite serial terminal program to communicate with the Bus Pirate.

    Microchip only released a Windows version of the firmware updater, but source is available and the protocol is well documented.

  4. So whats with that odd shortened URL to the shop?
    http://bit.ly/ubzfo
    Why bother? The link is dead according to my internet connection anyway, as of aroundabouts midnight BST!
    Have Seeeeeeedstudio gone down and ran off with your preorder money!?
    Or do they just switch their servers off at night!? ;-)
    I’m beginning to smell one of these internet rats I keep hearing about.

  5. Anyway, regardless of dodgy goings on…
    …after much looking around these buspirate articles i see there’s no mention of whether SeeedStudio are putting the bootloader and Bus Pirate firmware on for us?
    Will it come fully programmed for use fresh out of the ‘box’?
    Or are we going to have to shell out for an ICSP programmer too?

  6. Looks like a good tool to have in the junk box – ordered and paid for !

    It will be a interesting test of how good seedstudio are as a supplier. They have some other nice bits on their web site ($20 bluetooth UART, $50 JPEG VGA serial camera, etc). If they ship in a timely manner I’ll buy some more bits.

    BTW – for those who queried the firmware – if you check the listing on the supplier website, they say the device will be shipped programmed. All you need to do is just plug it in your computer and start playing !

  7. @stu – Fully programed with bootloader and v0g firmware, using the complete HEX dump here.

    re:Seeed

    For what it’s worth, YMMV, but: our Seeed orders (5?) of PCBs, etc, have taken exactly 7 days (including weekend days) from the time it’s mailed in China to the day it arrives in Europe.

    Not sure what’s up with the site (so many orders? Michael Jackson news took out the internet again?), but it seems to be back now.

    @meekrat – We’ll have a cable How-to next week.

  8. Well I bought one as an impulse purchase! Ooops! Hehe, the main feature I want is I2C sniffing to throw all commands observed straight onto the virtual terminal for working out what communication is happening…. I couldnt tell if it was completely finished yet though? There seemed to be a macro for something very similar….

  9. Thanks for the info – its nice to know the little devil will have the firmware on it! Sure there’s mention on the Seeedstudio website of it being pre-loaded, but the site was down throughout my whole time online last night!
    I rechecked the URL again, I’ve preordered one now too!
    Sweeet!
    I ordered a spare USB cable too, I sincerely hope they dont send that out to me now prior to the buspirate release, now that would make for a disappointing package thru the door!
    Thanks for a fantastic protocol analyser (do you have a good name for what it does?) I cant wait!

  10. Am I being stupid or is the latest firmware v0h? On the seedstudio it says they will be shipped with the latest firmware v0g…. v0h has the crucial I2C sniffer function that I bought the device for, though I guess I can always upgrade….

  11. @chris – The latest firmware is v0g. v0h is under development, but you can download our nightly compiles. Nightly compiles usually don’t have major bugs (but might!), though they lack the extensive functionality testing that goes into a final release.

    The I2C sniffer in v0h is still a work in progress. The Bus Pirate is primarily designed to talk to chips, so the bus sniffer will never be as useful as a true logic analyzer for reverse engineering.

    @spyguy99 – I’m sure you could add an AVR programmer, but it’s not on our feature roadmap.

  12. Oh!! I have some problem about FPGA.
    Have you programed the FPGA or not?

    I port your code to PIC32MX440F256H and I can program XSVF file to CPLD but I can’t program to FPGA.

    Do you have any suggestion?

    Thanks in advance
    Jin

  13. @jin – No, I haven’t programmed a FGPA with the XSVF programmer. There’s an app note from Xilinx that describes some delays that might need to be increased for different chips. The datasheet is linked in the Bus Pirate JTAG article.

    Are you able to reset and communicate with the JTAG interface using basic commands and the helper macros (type ‘(0)’ for a menu of macros)?

  14. Hey,

    I would like to order one (or more) of these in the future. But when would more of them be available? This being a “Pre”-order is there gonna be a steady supply of them thereafter or is this more like a once off deal?

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