You need to get an SPI bus on something right now, but you left your laptop at home. No problems, because you’ve got your Bus Pirate and cellphone in your pocket. And a USB OTG cable, because you’re going to need one of those. And some probes. And maybe a soldering iron for tacking magnet wire onto those really small traces. And maybe a good magnifying glass. And…
OK, our fantasy of stepping away from the party for a quick JTAG debugging session is absurd, but what’s not at all absurd is the idea of driving your Bus Pirate from a nice GUI app on your Android phone. [James Newton] wrote DroidScriptBusPirate so that he wouldn’t have to hassle with the Bus Pirate’s nested single-character menu system, and could easily save complete scripts to do common jobs from pleasant menus on his phone.
The setup depends on downloading DroidScript, a free Javascript and HTML5 IDE, and then pasting and saving [James]’ code. He’s written up full instructions to help you with the install. It’s not so hard, and once you’re done you’ll be ready to drive the Pirate from the comfort of your phone.
In fact, now that we think of it, we’re missing a Bus Pirate GUI for our desktop as well. Whenever we have complex tasks, we end up scripting something in Python, but there ought to be something more user-friendly. Anyone know of a good GUI solution?
There is a similar tool, called Hardsploit. There was a talk at 32c3 conference, it looks very interesting and has nice GUI.
Nice one, but the interface board costs like 10 bus pirates…
Bus pirate is also pocket sized compared to that (That’s a good thing, I want to be able to easily move prtable hardware…)
You obviously didn’t search at all for a desktopp GUI. Try this: https://www.google.com/search?q=Bus+Pirate+GUI&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjHkZCxqNLKAhVJ7GMKHdViBQYQsAQIHA&biw=1316&bih=890#imgrc=_
I just downloaded four different GUI’s for Windows. Some links are no longer any good, but just use the Wayback Machine.
I did the same search you did, and looked at two that were linked off of Dangerous Prototypes — one was a dead link and the other seemed “meh” to me on first glance.
You like anything that you’ve found? Have you tried them out yet?
I am SO excited about this! I’ve been wishing for a Windows GUI for this thing since day 1, but an Android one is even cooler. I still want a working desktop version, but being able to do all the “electronic swiss army knife” stuff the Bus Pirate does from my pocket is astonishingly useful and cool! Thank you so much, James.