The Bus Pirate, created by Ian Lesnet and featured on Hack a Day, is a troubleshooting tool that communicates between a PC and any embedded device over most standard serial protocols, which include I2C, SPI, and asynchronous serial - all at voltages from 0-5.5VDC. This product eliminates a ton of early prototyping effort when working with new or unknown chips.
Working with the Bus Pirate is simple and effective - type commands into a terminal on your computer, those commands are interpreted by the Bus Pirate and sent via the proper protocol. The Pirate will also interpret data sent from your embedded device back to your computer terminal. A big bonus is the bootloader installed on the PIC, which allows you to easily update the firmware and change the functionality of the board.
The main components of the Bus Pirate are PIC24FJ64 processor and an FT232RL USB-to-Serial chip. A Mini-B USB connector is populated on the board, and when you plug it into your computer it will come up as a virtual COM port.
Supported protocols:
1-Wire
I2C
SPI
JTAG
Asynchronous serial
MIDI
PC keyboard
HD44780 LCD
2- and 3-wire libraries with bitwise pin control
Scriptable binary bitbang, 1-Wire, I2C, SPI, and UART modes
0-5.5volt tolerant pins
0-6volt measurement probe
1Hz - 40MHz frequency measurement
1kHz - 4MHz pulse-width modulator, frequency generator
On-board multi-voltage pull-up resistors
On-board 3.3volt and 5volt power supplies with software reset
Macros for common operations
Bus traffic sniffers (SPI, I2C)
A bootloader for easy firmware updates
Transparent USB->serial mode
10Hz - 1MHz low-speed logic analyzer
Scriptable from Perl, Python, etc.
Translations (currently Spanish and Italian)
Enumerates as a virtual COM port over USB
Can operate as AVR STK v2 clone programmer
Access to PIC24FJ64 ICSP programming port
Price: