Uwe Hermann's blog

Hi everyone!

We're happy to announce the release of libsigrok 0.2.2! This is a minor bugfix release without any API changes, but it also adds support for a few new devices.

We added support for one new logic analyzer in this release, the Saleae Logic16. This is a streaming 16-channel device with a max. samplerate of 100MHz (when 3 channels are used; lower samplerates must be used if you use more channels). The driver was contributed by Marcus Comstedt, thanks a lot! You can use the sigrok-fwextract-saleae-logic16 tool from our sigrok-util repository to extract the required bitstream and firmware files from the vendor software.

We now also support a few more multimeters (all of them with RS232 connectivity):

• ISOTECH IDM103N, a Cyrustek ES51978 based 4000 counts DMM (thanks Aurelien Jacobs)
• Norma DM950 (a.k.a Normameter 950 a.k.a. Siemens B1028), a 21000 counts DMM (thanks Matthias Heidbrink)
• Metex M-4650CR (a.k.a. Voltcraft M-4650CR)

And two new thermometers (temperature dataloggers):

• UNI-T UT325, a 2-channel temperature logger with USB connectivity
• Center 309 (a.k.a. Voltcraft K204), a 4-channel temperature logger with RS232 connectivity

Finally, the first "device" in the "Energy meters" category that we support: the EDF Teleinfo (thanks Aurelien Jacobs!). This is not a specific piece of gear per se, but rather a standard protocol that is used for energy metering purposes in France.

Apart from the expanded device support, there is also the new csv input module (file format), thanks Marc Schink! That means you can now read logic analyzer data from various CSV-like files into libsigrok (and then do everything with that data you can do normally, e.g. convert to other formats, display, run protocol decoders on it and so on).

There have also been a number of improvements and fixes for various drivers (e.g. uni-t-dmm, ols, rigol-ds1xx2, agilent-dmm) and some random bugfixes and portability fixes in the rest of the code. Feel free to browse the NEWS file or git log for the details.

You can download the libsigrok-0.2.2.tar.gz tarball from sigrok.org/download as usual.

Have fun!
 

We're happy to announce that libsigrok now supports yet another multimeter, the Norma DM950 (a.k.a. Normameter 950, a.k.a. Siemens B1028).

This is a 21000 counts autorange DMM with RS232 connectivity.

Many thanks to Matthias Heidbrink for writing the driver and figuring out the protocol! As always we have a nice wiki page for this device now, including teardown photos, protocol description, and so on.

The DMM uses a custom microcontroller internally, and the protocol is a SCPI-like ASCII based protocol with the familiar-looking "IDN?" strings and so on. Please also check the driver source code if you're interested in the details.

There are various other DMM models from this series which can be supported relatively easily via this driver. Please contact us (and/or the driver author, "mh") in the #sigrok IRC channel on Freenode if you own one of these devices and can test further patches. Thanks!

libsigrokdecode now supports a new protocol decoder (PD) named parallel.

This PD can decode various simple synchronous, parallel buses that have one clock line and a (pretty much) arbitrary number of data lines.

The decoder can be configured to sample the data lines (e.g. D0-D3 for a 4-bit sync parallel bus, D0-D7 for an 8-bit bus, or D0-D31 for a 32-bit bus, and so on) on either the rising or falling clock edge.

It can then print the data in various formats (currently only 'hex' is supported, but more can be added easily), e.g. 0x55 for an 8-bit bus or 0x55667788 for a 32-bit bus, and so on.
 

Thanks to Aurelien Jacobs libsigrok now supports a new multimeter, the ISO-TECH IDM103N. This is a 4000 counts DMM with RS232 connectivity.

The respective patch for enabling this DMM also adds a generic es519xx.c parser (based on the old es51922.c which will be obsoleted soon), which should be able to handle various Cyrustek ES519xx DMM ICs. That'll make it easy to add more DMMs using one of these Cyrustek chips later.

Another new thing in libsigrok is the SR_UNIT_REVOLUTIONS_PER_MINUTE (RPM) unit, which allows us to properly support the DMM's RPM feature.
 

We're happy to announce that libsigrok now supports the Saleae Logic16 logic analyzer.

This is the successor product of the well-known Saleae Logic (an 8-channel logic analyzer with a max. samplerate of 24MHz and streaming capabilities).

The Logic16 has 16 channels and can sample at rates of up to 100MHz, depending on the number of channels used. If you only need 3 channels you can sample at 100MHz, or 50MHz for 6 channels, or 32MHz for 9 channels, or 16MHz when using all 16 channels.

The property of the Logic16 that makes it really interesting is that it can still stream out the data live over USB (like the Logic) and is thus not limited to any internal buffer size of the logic analyzer itself, while at the same time allowing a samplerate higher than 24MHz. This makes it possible to capture fast signals for longer periods of time (as opposed to just a few milliseconds as is the case for many other devices) which can be very useful in practice.

It also has the advantage that you can switch between two different voltage threshold settings, allowing you to debug either 1.8V / 3.3V systems, or 5V systems.

Of course it still has the same limitations as the Logic, too. Whether the continuous byte stream from the Logic16 can be received quickly enough over USB without missing any bytes depends on various random factors, such as the USB controller in your PC, the OS/kernel version used, the amount of other USB devices connected and how much data those transfer at the same time, etc. etc. But still, for many cases it works well enough to make it quite useful.

Many thanks to Marcus Comstedt for figuring out how the Logic16 protocol works, and for writing the libsigrok driver! He also documented the protocol in the wiki, as well as various firmware internals. We also have some teardown photos, pinouts of the ICs used in the Logic16 and their connections, EEPROM layout and other info in the wiki, if you're interested in this kind of stuff.

The device uses a Cypress FX2 USB chip and a Xilinx Spartan-3A XC3S200A FPGA internally. The first needs a firmware upload when the Logic16 is attached to USB, the latter needs an FPGA bitstream upload upon USB connection (as well as another bitstream upload whenever the voltage threshold setting is changed).

Thanks to Marcus Comstedt again who provided the sigrok-fwextract-saleae-logic16 tool which you can use to extract the FX2 firmware and the two FPGA bitstreams from the vendor software. See the manpage for details.
 

Hi everyone!

We're happy to announce the new libsigrok 0.2.1 release. This is mostly a bugfix release with a few additional new drivers to support more hardware. No major API changes were performed.

We added support for two new logic analyzers. One of them is the IKALOGIC Scanalogic-2, a 4-channel device with a max. samplerate of 20MHz. The driver was contributed by Marc Schink (thanks a lot!), who also wrote up some nice documentation about the USB HID based protocol in the wiki.

The other device we now support is also an IKALOGIC device (just a coincidence), namely the new ScanaPLUS, a 9-channel logic analyzer with a fixed samplerate of 100MHz, which compresses the captured data and streams it to the PC. This device uses an FPGA internally and an FTDI FT232H for data transfers. The protocol is thus not USB HID based like on the Scanalogic-2. We documented the ScanaPLUS USB protocol in the wiki too, if you want to have a look at the details.

We now also support two additional sound level meters, the CEM DT-8852 and the Kecheng KC-330B. Please check the previous blog post about these devices.

Finally, support for four new multimeters has been added, the UNI-T UT60A and UNI-T UT60E (thanks Florian Knodt!), the Voltcraft M-3650D (thanks Florian Steinhardt!) and the Voltcraft VC-830. They were all pretty easy to add to our generic 'serial-dmm' driver which can support a wide variety of serial-based DMMs with "simple" protocol.

Apart from that we added a few new config keys, config info types, and error codes. We also did the usual bunch of code cleanups, documentation improvements, and bugfixes. Please read the NEWS file for details.

You can download the libsigrok-0.2.1.tar.gz tarball from sigrok.org/download as usual.

Have fun!
 

We're happy to announce that libsigrok now supports the Ikalogic SCANALOGIC-2 logic analyzer.

This is a low-cost 4-channel logic analyzer with a max. samplerate of 20MHz with 256Ksamples of memory per channel.

It is available both as a fully assembled, ready-to-use device, as well as a slightly cheaper DIY kit where you can solder most of the parts on your own.

Many thanks to Marc Schink for contributing the driver and documenting the USB protocol of the logic analyzer in the wiki!
 

We're happy to announce the 0.1.1 release of sigrok-firmware-fx2lafw, the open-source firmware which allows you to use almost any device with a Cypress FX2/FX2LP chip as a simple logic analyzer (together with libsigrok and a frontend, of course).

You can download the source tarball from SourceForge as usual. Additionally, you can also grab pre-built firmware files instead, if you don't want to compile them yourself.

This is mostly a bugfix release. It features a simpler and more common "./configure && make && make install" build system, updated documentation, and some fixes for differently named sdcc tools on different OSes or distros (e.g. Mac OS X, Fedora, others).

It also adds support for the USBee DX device (only logic analyzer functionality, as with the other devices), and support for the older FX2 (not FX2LP) variant of the Cypress USB chip. This is important since we've seen both these cases in practice: older logic analyzers which have the FX2 chip, as well as devices which pretend to have an FX2LP chip but in reality it is a "rebadged" FX2.

See the NEWS file for the full list of user-visible changes.

We're happy to announce the new libsigrokdecode 0.1.1 release!

You can download the source tarball from SourceForge, as usual.

This is mostly a bugfix-release, the C library API was not changed. This means existing frontends that work with / are linked against libsigrokdecode 0.1.0 (e.g. sigrok-cli 0.3.1) will continue to work just fine, without requiring relinking or recompiling.

However, some of the protocol decoders' output changed in ways which are not compatible with the state of the decoders in the last libsigrokdecode release. This means, if you're using any scripts to parse sigrok-cli decoder output, or if you have any "private" protocol decoders that stack on top of one of those shipped with libsigrokdecode, you will have to do some adaptations. You're also encouraged to submit such decoders to be included in libsigrokdecode proper, of course!

In addition to all kinds of improvements and bugfixes in existing protocol decoders (PDs), you're probably most interested in what new protocol decoders are now supported. So here's the list:

• avr_isp: AVR In-System Programming
• can: Controller Area Network
• jtag: Joint Test Action Group (IEEE 1149.1)
• jtag_stm32: Joint Test Action Group / ST STM32
• lm75: National LM75
• lpc: Low-Pin-Count
• maxim_ds28ea00: Maxim DS28EA00 1-Wire digital thermometer
• onewire_link: 1-Wire serial communication bus (link layer)
• onewire_network: 1-Wire serial communication bus (network layer)
• sdcard_spi: Secure Digital card (SPI mode)
• tlc5620: Texas Instruments TLC5620 DAC
• uart_dump: UART dump

This adds up to currently 29 supported PDs. The decoders are in various stages of "feature completeness", of course. Additional improvements and more verbose/complete decoding functionality will be added over time.

You can use some example files we've collected in the sigrok-dumps repository to test the protocol decoders. For example, the CAN decoder:

 $ sigrok-cli -i mcp2515dm-bm-1mbits_msg_222_5bytes.sr -a can:can_rx=2
 can: "Start of frame" "SOF" 
 can: "ID: 0 (0x0)" 
 can: "IDE: standard frame" 
 can: "RB0: 0" 
 can: "RTR: data frame" 
 can: "Stuff bit: 1" 
 can: "DLC: 7" 
 can: "Stuff bit: 0" 
 can: "Stuff bit: 1" 
 can: "Stuff bit: 0" 
 can: "Data byte 0: 0xf0" 
 can: "Data byte 1: 0x00"
 [...]

Or, the basic JTAG decoder:

 $ sigrok-cli -i olimex_stm32-h103_irscan_drscan.sr -a jtag:trst=0:tdi=1:tms=2:tck=3:tdo=4
 jtag: "New state: SELECT-DR-SCAN" 
 jtag: "New state: SELECT-IR-SCAN" 
 jtag: "New state: CAPTURE-IR" 
 jtag: "New state: SHIFT-IR" 
 [...]
 jtag: "New state: SHIFT-IR" 
 jtag: "New state: EXIT1-IR" 
 jtag: "IR TDI: 11111110 (0xfe), 8 bits" 
 jtag: "IR TDO: 11110001 (0xf1), 8 bits" 
 jtag: "New state: UPDATE-IR" 

Or, stacking the STM32-specific JTAG protocol decoder on top of the JTAG decoder:

 $ sigrok-cli -i olimex_stm32-h103_irscan_drscan.sr \
   -a jtag:trst=0:tdi=1:tms=2:tck=3:tdo=4,jtag_stm32 -s jtag,jtag_stm32
 jtag_stm32: "IR: IDCODE"
 jtag_stm32: "IDCODE: 0x3ba00477 (ver=0x3, part=0xba00, manuf=0x23b, res=0x1)" 

If you want to contribute any additional sample files for various protocols (*.sr format as produced by sigrok-cli) for our sigrok-dumps repository that would be great!

We're also currently in the process of adding a wiki page for every protocol decoder, with detailed information about the protocol it decodes, the decoder implementation and its status, how to use it, which decoders it stacks on (or which ones can stack on top of it), and so on. Check the pages for mx25lxx05d, dcf77, or nunchuk, for some (work in progress) examples.

Please check the libsigrokdecode NEWS file for the full list of user-visible changes in this release. As always, we're happy about bug reports, feature suggestions, comments about which protocol decoders you'd want supported next, or even better — patches :)

Same as last year, we will be at the Chaos Communication Congress (29c3), this time in Hamburg, Germany. The conference takes place from December 27th to 30th, 2012.

We'll have a sigrok "assembly", likely in area 3b of the conference building, where we'll be hanging around, working on new sigrok features, new hardware drivers, new protocol decoders and various other things. We'll have lots of gear with us for demo and development purposes, including logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, MSOs, multimeters, and lots more.

Bring your own device if you own models we don't yet support or know about. We'll be happy to have a look!

Chat with us, give us your suggestions which features you'd like to see, which devices you want to be supported, which protocol decoders you'd like to have, or even help us write some drivers/decoders!

Hope to see you there!