Today I received my long awaited Saleae Logic Pro 16 logic analyzer. This fantastic little device has 16 input channels that can be individually configured as digital or analog inputs. With its USB3 interface, it’s able to capture data at pretty high speed too. Up to 500MS/s (million samples per second) digital and 50MS/s analog, but it drops a bit when using more channels though.

To give it a first try, I hooked it up to the regular Arduino Uno compatible Sparkfun RedBoard that I already had running. I tapped into the I²C wires and an analogue wire and started sampling. It worked like a charm right away with no trouble at all. The screenshot below is actually from my very first run. A cool and neat detail are the wire colouring that follow the common resistor value coloring.

When writing this, the Pro 16 is brand new and requires the latest beta software. It’s still very simple to install, use, and seems to be quite stable as well. The UI is intuitive and is quite easy to navigate. The protocol analysers are my favourites. Just attach an analyser and tell it what channels corresponds to each line, and it’ll decode all data.

It comes with a lot of protocol analysers for common interfaces, such as I²C, I²S, SPI, 1-Wire, CAN, JTAG, Midi, Modbus, PS/2, USB 1.1, HDMI etc. Now I hope I can find some time to write custom analysers for the DHT22 and WS2812. But it’s always that “spare-time-issue”…

My intention was to spend this evening playing around with Sitecore 8 and blog about it, but unfortunately there were some trouble with the distribution of the Technical preview. But today I received a long awaited UPS package with two MicroViews. It’s basically a small Arduino with a 64×48 pixel oled display built into a standard DIP package.

I found the device really simple to work with. Just hook it into to a computer using a FTDI interface and program in with the common Arduino IDE works really well! Geek Ammo and Sparkfun has done a really good job in making a user friendly product. So, instead of the standard “Hello World” program, I decided to try do something a little bit more useful with it as a first project.

In our vacation house in Lappland, about 1000km away from home, I have a little Raspberry PI hooked up with some sensors measuring temperate etc. It sends this data periodically to one of my servers at home. Using another Raspberry PI at home, I made a very simple little script that gets the current sensor values and transmits it to the MicroView over a serial line. The MicroView then reads this data and displays the current indoor and outdoor temperature and the indoor humidity at the vacation house.

Well, it’s not very pretty, actually it looks quite ugly, but as I write this blog post, it’s only three hours since I unboxed the MicroView. (The poor picture quality doesn’t help.) Now that’s what I call rapid prototyping!

Maybe next project could be showing some of the Sitecore 8 launch pad diagrams of, for example, campaign conversions and visit values, on the MicroView 🙂