When working on an electronic project it’s likely you will find yourself working with a variety of different instruments, be they logic analysers, oscilloscopes, or whatever. These can take up a lot of space, not to mention cost a bundle of cash. [Max.K] came up with PicoLab as a solution, it’s an all-in-one box containing a 4-channel oscilloscope, 8-channel logic analyser, GPIOs, a data logger, and serial, SPI, and i2C interfaces. There’s even an adjustable power supply!
Behind it all is an RP2350, in its larger package with more pins, coupled to some custom interface and protection circuitry. Perhaps the cleverest part is its interface, which it serves as a web site on the network card it exposes through the USB port. Any OS that supports a web browser and USB networking can thus use this thing. You can find all the code in a GitHub repository, should you wish to have a go at building one yourself. We like this idea.
Unfortunately I keep banging my head into the need for far more than 8 channels. If only it wasn’t far more expensive to ship an old HP unit to me than to actually buy it!
You can get 27 channels with a RP2350/Pico2 board including RLE-compression with this project: https://github.com/rabbitholecomputing/RP2350_Logic_Sniffer
I can’t say these devices are that rare anymore, but i can appreciate the simplicity of the hardware. It is an army of bi-directional transceivers along with a I2C voltage regulator, some current measuring amps and the RP2350B hardware. It is simple, yet effective and i am definitely checking out that MP28167-A I2C Regulator.
Firmware is a bit of a mess though as everything is crammed into a single C file of ~2900 lines. It definitely could benefit from getting split up by functionality so that it is easier to maintain or for others to re-use. I guess messy code is just going to be a recurring theme in this AI-powered era.