Uwe Hermann's blog

We're happy to announce the sigrok-firmware-fx2lafw 0.1.7 release. This is an open-source firmware that allows you to use almost any of the popular Cypress FX2 based devices as logic analyzers. It also supports a number of FX2 based USB oscilloscopes/MSOs like the Hantek 6022BE/BL or the Sainsmart DDS120.

The source code and pre-built firmware files are available from the usual place:

• sigrok-firmware-fx2lafw-0.1.7.tar.gz
• sigrok-firmware-fx2lafw-bin-0.1.7.tar.gz

This release adds support for the YiXingDianZi MDSO device, as well as experimental support for FX2-based logic analyzer devices to sample at 48 MHz (for usually only a very short amount of time, heavily depends on USB bus conditions).

It also fixes a few bugs for the Hantek 6022BE and Sainsmart DDS120 oscilloscope devices, and some sdcc related issues.

The NEWS file contains some more details.

As you probably know, we've been providing pre-built Linux binaries for PulseView and sigrok-cli in the form of AppImages for a while now. Those can be useful/convenient if you want to test sigrok without having to build from source, and/or if the packages of your favorite Linux distro are out of date.

You can simply download a single *.AppImage file, make it executable via "chmod+x" and run it (see the wiki for details).

As of today, the AppImages we provide are now being built on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Xenial Xerus (originally released 2016) instead of the previously used Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr (originally released 2014, Canonical support ended 04/2019).

This has been done since we're now using a more recent version of Qt for PulseView (that is not easily available in the older Ubuntu version), and also to get more recent versions of various other libraries we use in general.

This change shouldn't affect too many people, the new AppImages should work fine on pretty much any modern Linux distro which is somewhat newer than Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Xenial Xerus from 2016.

libsigrok now supports the Sysclk SLA5032 logic analyzer.

This is a 32-channel logic analyzer with up to 500MHz sampling rate. It can be switched into one of three different modes (the current mode is indicated by a green LED on the respective mode text):

• 32CH 500M: 500MHz sampling rate, 32 channels, max. 64Mbits storage per channel, support for hardware triggers (sysclk-sla5032 driver).
• Saleae 100M: The device enumerates as a Saleae Logic16, streaming possible like with the Logic16, only software triggers (saleae-logic16 driver).
• Saleae 500M: Similar to the above, but the max. sampling rate is actually 500MHz.

The device uses a Xilinx Spartan FPGA, DDR2 RAM, 2 SPI flashes, 2 I²C EEPROMs, a Cypress FX2, an Atmel ATmega8A microcontroller and a bunch of other components internally, full details in the wiki.

The libsigrok driver was contributed by Vitaliy Vorobyov, thanks a lot!

Once again, libsigrokdecode has gained support for yet another protocol decoder. This time: cc1101.

This PD decodes the SPI-based protocol of the Texas Instruments CC1101 sub-1GHz RF transceiver chip.

As usual, there are a few sample files in our sigrok-dumps repo and a few test-cases in the sigrok-test repo (for catching regressions and such).

The decoder was contributed by Marco Geisler, thanks a lot!

Also, congratulations for contributing the 100th protocol decoder supported by libsigrokdecode!

You can checkout all 100 supported decoders (authored by roughly 50 or so unique contributors) in our wiki. There's also a huge bunch of additional decoders that are on our wishlist and/or are already work-in-progress, i.e. the work towards 200 supported decoders has already begun. Also, your contribution could help us get there faster, hint hint :)

libsigrokdecode now supports yet another protocol decoder: ds2408.

This one decodes the Maxim DS2408 1-Wire 8-channel addressable switch protocol.

Some example traces are available in the sigrok-dumps repo, as usual.

The decoder was contributed by Mariusz Bialonczyk, thanks a lot!

PulseView recently gained initial support for a feature that has been requested quite a bit in the past: saving and restoring a specific session setup.

There was support for restoring (most of) the state from the last PulseView run already; it would re-open your last-used *.sr file, the decoders that were used, and so on.

However, in the current nightly builds you can now also save a specific session to a new file type with the .pvs extension, and restore settings from that file at a later point in time.

For example, if you're working with a foo.sr file and a bar.sr file, different settings and decoders in each, you can now also save a foo.pvs and/or bar.pvs file, and restore those specific session setups a few weeks later, without having to remember the exact setup, without having to click a whole bunch of times to restore all decoders and so on...

Feedback (e.g. on IRC, #sigrok on Freenode) and bug reports for this feature are welcome, as always.

As mentioned previously, there was a short "Introduction to sigrok" lightning talk by Soeren Apel at the 35C3 congress in Leipzig, Germany recently.

The video of the talk is now up on various platforms:

• PeerTube (decentralized, federated, OSS-based video sharing, details here)
• media.ccc.de
• YouTube

Have fun!

If you're at this year's CCC Congress (35C3) December 27-30 in Leipzig, Germany, please feel free to drop by at the sigrok assembly.

We'll be there all 4 days of the congress (with the usual set of random test & measurement devices) for hackathons and random development discussions.

We're always happy to chat with users and contributors, hear about your feature requests and ideas for improvements etc. You can also bring your own devices, chances are we might be able to write drivers for some of the "simpler" devices right then and there, or at least grab some relevant information (photos, lsusb, possibly teardowns if you want).

There will also be an Introduction to sigrok lightning talk (2018-12-29, 12:05–12:10, Borg) by Soeren Apel (abraxa on IRC), make sure to check it out.

Assembly location: I2, Exhibition Hall 2, Level 0.

We're happy to announce the new PulseView 0.4.1 release!

This is quite a major release with loads of new features and bugfixes.

It requires the recently released libsigrok 0.5.1 and libsigrokdecode 0.5.2.

We provide various binary builds for Linux (AppImage), Windows (.exe installer) and Mac OS X (DMG) for the release version over at the Downloads page (in addition to the usual nightly builds).

Major new features and improvements:

• One of the most-often requested features has been implemented: Snapping cursors to signal edges. The current implementation snaps to edges of a specific channel if the mouse cursor is inside that channel, and it snaps to edges of any channel otherwise. When moving both cursors at the same time, only the left cursor will snap, while the overall distance between the cursors stays the same (which allows for easy measurements/comparisons).
• There's a bunch of new command-line switches such as --driver or --dont-scan, as well as option support for --input-file, see manpage for details. You can now also load multiple files at once when starting Pulseview, e.g. via "pulseview *.sr" or the like.
• There's support for converting analog channels to digital/logic channels now, either via a threshold or a schmitt-trigger method. This allows feeding the converted channels to protocol decoders, which was not possible before.
• PulseView now has theme support and ships with the current (default) "light" theme and two new "dark"-style themes which some people might prefer.
• There have been a bunch of UI improvements, such as showing a tooltip for the cursor measurement values if needed, logic high areas are now colored differently for clearer visualization, there's a convenience mouse hover vertical line now, you can enable/disable many channels more easily via buttons, and lots more.
• Protocol decoder annotations can now be exported in a user-configurable format, either all annotations, or only those of a certain annotation row, or only those between the cursors, etc.
• Protocol decoder channel name auto-mapping has been improved, so it'll probably match your desired channel setup more often without requiring manual channel assignment.

There's also a new PulseView HTML manual as well as a PDF manual with a bunch of explanations and help. If you're missing something in there, please let us know and/or provide patches!

Additionally, there have been quite a few performance and memory usage improvements. E.g. files should load quite a bit faster now, some painting operations are faster as well, various memory leaks and inefficiencies have been fixed, and so on.

Of course there have also been a huge amount of fixes for some rather annoying bugs (e.g. UI lag when changing decoder options/channels) and also many smaller ones. A bunch of crash conditions on various OSes have also been fixed.

See the NEWS file for a much more detailed list of changes, or browse the git history for even more details.

We're happy to announce the release of sigrok-cli 0.7.1. Tarballs and binaries are available from the Downloads page, as usual.

In addition to the usual nightly binaries for Linux (AppImage) and Windows (.exe installer), we now also offer a stable set of binaries of this 0.7.1 sigrok-cli release. These binaries will stay unchanged (for easier debugging and problem analysis, if needed). They include the currently released versions of the required libraries/components: libserialport 0.1.1, libsigrok 0.5.1, libsigrokdecode 0.5.2, sigrok-firmware-fx2lafw 0.1.6.

This is a minor release with small additions (e.g. --protocol-decoder-samplenum), documentation fixes, performance improvements, random bugfixes, and a few other improvements.

See the NEWS file for a much more detailed list of changes, or browse the git history for even more details.