ChronoVu LA8

The ChronoVu LA8 is a USB-based 8-channel logic analyzer with up to 100MHz sampling rate. It features a Xilinx CPLD for sampling, 8MB of built-in SDRAM to store the samples, and can trigger on low or high states of any combination of probes. After the 8MB sample buffer is full, the data is transferred to the host using an FTDI USB-to-serial chip.

See ChronoVu LA8/Info for more details (such as lsusb -vvv output) about the device.

Thanks

Many thanks to the vendor (ChronoVu) for freely providing information on the protocol used to communicate with the device. This helped us implement the sigrok hardware driver more quickly. We're happy to see more open-source friendly vendors support sigrok!

Hardware

Xilinx XC2C256 CoolRunner-II CPLD
Micron MT48LC4M16A2 SDRAM (8 MByte)
FTDI FT245RL
LXH244A (buffer)
PT70151

Usage

$ sigrok-cli -d chronovu-la8 --samples 8388603 -f binary > samples.dat

The default samplerate is 100MHz (which results in a sampling time of 0.084s). To select another sampling rate use this syntax:

$ sigrok-cli -d chronovu-la8:samplerate=1mhz --samples 8388603 -f binary > samples.dat

Protocol

The ChronoVu LA8 is a USB-based device and presents itself as an FTDI USB-to-Serial device with vendor ID / device ID of 0403:6001 (see also the full lsusb). Talking to the device is thus done using libftdi's ftdi_read() and ftdi_write() functions.

Starting an acquisition

The data acquisition is started by sending 4 specific bytes to the device via ftdi_write(). This configures the sampling and trigger setup and initiates the acquisition.

Byte	Value	Comment
0	divcount	This byte must contain the divcount value which determines the samplerate/sampletime/sampleperiod (see below).
1	0xff	This byte must always be 0xff.
2	Trigger pattern	This byte contains the trigger pattern (MSB = channel 7, LSB = channel 0). A 1 bit matches a high signal, 0 matches a low signal on a probe. Only low/high triggers (but not e.g. rising/falling) are supported.
3	Trigger mask	This byte contains the trigger mask (MSB = channel 7, LSB = channel 0). A 1 bit means "must match trigger pattern", 0 means "don't care".

After these bytes have been sent you need to wait a certain minimal amount of time, then grab the 8MB buffer data from the LA8 using ftdi_read().

Demangling data

However, the data received from the device is not directly usable as it is "mangled" a bit due to internal hardware reasons. So it's required to de-mangle the data first, in order to get it into the final format, i.e., one byte per sample, MSB is the value of channel 7, LSB is the value of channel 0.

Stopping an acquisition

Triggers

Sampling

The device has an 8MB buffer (SDRAM) which is always filled completely with samples. Using the divcount divider value (valid range: 0x00 - 0xfe) samplerates between 100MHz and 392.15kHz can be selected. Depending on the samplerate different total sampling times (from 0.084s up to 21.391s) can be achieved.

The formula for the sample period (not to be confused with the samplerate) is:

sample period = (divcount + 1) * 10ns

The following table shows a small part of the valid divcount values and resulting sample periods, samplerates, and sampling times.

Divider	Sample period	Samplerate	Sampling time
0x00	10ns	100MHz	0.084s
0x01	20ns	50MHz	0.168s
...	...	...	...
0xfd	2540ns	...	...
0xfe	2550ns	392.15kHz	21.391s

TODO

Implement input and output file format support for the ChronoVu LA8 software for interoperability.
Implement proper trigger support.
Implement --time and --samples correctly, currently you can only get exactly 8388603 (8MB) samples.