Overview
The "Bus Pirate", designed by Dangerous Prototypes, is a universal bus interface that talks to most chips from a PC serial terminal, eliminating a ton of early prototyping effort when working with new or unknown chips. Many serial protocols are supported at 0-5.5volts, more can be added.
- 1-Wire
- I2C
- SPI
- JTAG
- Asynchronous serial
- MIDI
- PC keyboard
- HD44780 LCD
- 2- and 3-wire libraries with bitwise pin control
- Scriptable binary bitbang, 1-Wire, I2C, SPI, and UART modes
Other Features
- 0-6volt measurement probe
- 1Hz-40MHz frequency measurement
- 1kHz - 4MHz pulse-width modulator, frequency generator
- On-board multi-voltage pull-up resistors
- On-board 3.3volt and 5volt power supplies with software reset
- Macros for common operations
- Bus traffic sniffers (SPI, I2C)
- A bootloader for easy firmware updates
- Transparent USB->serial mode
- 10Hz-1MHz SUMP compatible low-speed logic analyzer
- AVR STK500 v2 programmer clone
- Supported in AVRDude programmer
- Scriptable from Perl, Python, etc.
- Translations (currently Spanish and Italian)
Differences from the Official BPv4
The hardware is functionally identical with the official BPv4. There are however a couple of modifications:
- The PWR LED and USB LED are removed. MODE LED and VREG LED are combined to a single dual LED. The green one is for onboard power regulator and the red one is for MODE indication.
- A resettable fuse is added to the design, which could protect the USB port of your PC in case short circuit occurs.
In the Package
- A fully tested and assembled Bus Pirate board in a while/blue plastic enclosure with the latest bootloader (v4.4) and firmware (v6.1).
- A 20-pin rainbow cable with female header on each side.
- An 80cm USB mini cable.
- 12 probes with male headers in 6 different colors.
- 6 additional probes in 6 different colors.
About the firmware and USB VID/PID
Bus Pirate v4 uses the integrated PIC USB peripheral for the emulated serial port connection and USB firmware updates. The serial port is CDC-ACM, an open and common device supported on most system without a driver. Although driver is not needed, Windows may need an INF file which defines what driver to install for certain USB VID/PID. Dangerous Prototype subleased a USB VID/PID from Microchip for BPv4. No more than 10K units can be produced with this VID/PID per Microchip sublease agreement. For the BPv4 we build and sell, we use our own USB VID/PID subleased from Microchip. This would not affect Dangerous Prototypes VID/PID quantity limit. The VID/PID is hardcoded in the firmware. Which means if you download the firmware from Dangerous Prototype, you would be using their VID/PID. Although it would work perfectly, this would in theory affects the number of unit that Dangerous Prototypes controls. Therefore, we recommend you to download firmware from us which is the same except the USB VID/PID.
Resources
- Bus Pirate manual
- Bus Pirate v3 vs v4 comparison
- Bus Pirate forum
- firmwares
- Driver for Windows