If you’re working on a mobile project – a robot, something outside, or even your car – you don’t want to bring an oscilloscope, logic analyzer, signal generator, or any other piece of equipment that should stay on the bench. For his Hackaday Prize Entry, [Pierce Nichols] is working on the electronic equivalent of a Leatherman: something small and portable that also does just enough to get by in a pinch.
The MultiSpork, as [Pierce] calls his device, is a single WiFi enabled board that’s completely portable. With the addition of a $50 Android tablet, it’s very close to a complete electronics lab in a box.
The heart of the MultiSpork is a new chip from Maxim, the MAX 11300. This chip has 20 pins that can be used as a 12-bit ADC, a 12-bit DAC, or as GPIOs. it’s a logic analyzer, signal generator, oscilloscope, and a Bus Pirate in a single chip. As far as the rest of the board goes, [Pierce] is forgoing any notion of a hardware freeze and changing the Atmel microcontroller over to a TI CC3200 chip that will be coming out soon.
[Pierce] put together a short video describing the MultiSpork; you can check that out below.
I’m not sure I understand why. I mean, the MAX11300 chip costs more than the combined cost of discrete ADCs and DACs of the same or better capability. Its not like making a logic analyzer using spare GPIO on the CC3200 is exceeding difficult, in fact is pretty trivial.
Just a 12-bit DAC with only 4-8 channels costs about as much as the MAX11300. Though I find it uncommon that I actually need more than 2 DAC channels.
The MAX11300 reminds me a lot of the low pin count Microchip MCUs that include a crossbar, allowing connection of any internal peripheral to almost any pin. That feature is one of the big reasons I chose them over Atmel. Also why they’re used in Bus Pirate.
If you like internal routing to any pin you should check out Cypress PSoCs (particularly 5LP). Absolutely crushes anything comparable to Microchip.
Haven’t tried them. IIRC they have op-amps and other analog building blocks built-in, looks great for mixed signal projects.
The video was like watching a Penn & Teller Video, geeeeeesh, let the guy on the right get a word or two in. Might be a neat project, all vapour ware at the moment, but they need to pick a new name asap, if the project takes off, multispork is way to dorky to be marketable, even to electronic dorks.
This is a cool idea — and I like to see people trying new things to see what works, but I wish they were using better silicon. The 20-channel reconfigurable I/O is neat, but I can’t think of many cases where a a dedicated 8-input logic analyzer / 4-channel scope / 2 channel AWG wouldn’t be sufficient. A fixed layout like that would be much lower cost than using that crazy-expensive Maxim part.
That part can only do 400 ksps on the analog side, and I don’t think they’ll be able to get more than 1 MHz of digital I/O performance from a single channel, and that’s going to decrease dramatically as you add more channels.
As a result, you end up with a scope that doesn’t even have half a megahertz of bandwidth, and a logic analyzer that can’t even sniff a low-speed 1 MHz SPI session, and would probably struggle to sniff i2C traffic, too.
I understand that it’s small and inexpensive, but at that point, does this thing really have much usefulness? It’s like using a pocket knife to build a house.
If you need to debug something on a 8-bit bus, sometimes you’ll need to have a few control lines too. So 12 inputs + optional clock would be useful too,
My download of the datasheet failed, so I could only see it had an 20MHz SPI interface from the website. Surely that would limit the sampling rate.
I think that’s the point: it’s touted as the Leatherman in your electronics toolbox. It’s true that you need proper and dedicated tools to build a large project like a house, a leatherman comes in handy when needing a quick screw turned or working on a smaller project (e.g. I would use a full power logic analyzer when reverse engineering seriously powerful asics, but if I’m at a friend’s place and he wants to know why his arduino isn’t responding to a serial chip, I could whip out this thing in a jiffy)
So it is like a Digilent Analog Discovery but with wifi instead of usb…
2-Channel Oscilloscope, 2-Channel Waveform Generator, 16-Channel Logic Analyzer, 16-Channel Digital Pattern Generator, ±5VDC Power Supplies, Spectrum Analyzer, Network Analyzer, Voltmeter, Digital I/O
Tested and approved (? I don’t remember his conclusions ?) by Dave. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aymumu3mYl8
Yeah, i am using the analog discovery for 99% of the time now, it covers a lot in such a small box. Sometimes I wish they made some app to run on a tablet, but then again, a laptop is portable as well.
I find it hard to justify that MAX chip in there. Basically, the only thing it does better is that it has more than 2 DAC channels and those switches between inputs. Otherwise, jut the ATSAM3S4A could be a better tool: faster ADC, faster GPIO with DMA which can be a better logic analyzer. Plus, it has HW SPI, I2C etc.
Interesting, looks like a sensible product. Too bad that unless you’re a US student it’s $279. Add S&H fees, add the customs ransom fee and you get figure bordering $400. For someone who’s empty handed and just starts building his new lab it would seem too expensive for a first investment, for someone who already has some equipment, it would probably be more economical to buy the missing pieces.
I paid abput 140 for it in europe, the student version. I remember the full one was about 200 euro.
Well I hope the HaD project can make it cheaper than 100$, at least if you DIY.
Oh neat, I was actually just looking at a very similar part recently, had to dig the number back up AD5593R(I2C) or AD5592R(SPI) 8bits of the same fully configurable type logic/dac/adc but with 8 I/O only.