Recently I’ve been playing around with some GameBoy hacking including its hardware – posts will come about this.
Before that I’ve had some work with communication between ICs and other devices and always had the feeling that development/troubleshooting would be far much easier if I could see the actual data transfers.
Unfortunately putting some LEDs around the wires is not always an option as the clock speed might be too fast to see them – of course when I program the master device I give the clock and mostly that could be slowed down, but in any other case seeing a LED blink at 4 MHz for example is not really for the naked eye.
So finally I made the decision to buy a logic analyzer. I found an 8 channel logic analyzer running at 24 MHz, that means I can sample 8 channels for logic high or low voltages at an interval of 41.67 nanoseconds, which is really cool. Fortunately enough the software part has a list of decoders where I can specify the purpose of each pin and the software automatically decodes and shows the actual data on each clock.
I’ll be back with more posts with this little analyzer guy soon. (Hopefully not Blizzard soon.)
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