And he thinks of my logic analyzer as a “simple serial analyzer”. His logic analyzers were extinct or out of my price range, and totally off my radar. So in the end, it was a simple misunderstanding – a result of our different backgrounds. And with the proliferation of easy and cheap modules, plus the need to debug and reverse commodity electronics, these logic analyzers have never been more useful. Heck, sometimes I’ll even break out a couple pins on the micro for state.
When I say “logic analyzer”, I’m thinking maybe 8 or 16 signals, and I’m thinking of debugging the communications between a microcontroller, an IMU, or maybe a QSPI flash chip. Meanwhile, I’m a self-taught hacker type. (Sounds yummy!) But now that modern CPUs have 64-bits, everything’s high-speed serial, and they’re all deeply integrated on the same chip anyway, such a monster machine is nearly useless. When he says “logic analyzer”, he’s thinking of a beast with a million probes that you could hook up to each and every data and address line in what would now be called a “retrocomputer”, giving you this god-like perspective on the entire system state. When we got down to it, however, we were actually completely in agreement – it turns out that when we said “logic analyzer” we each had different machines, and use cases, in mind.Īl has a serious engineering background and a long career in his pocket. (It’s Hackaday, after all.) He said they’re almost useless these days, and I maintained that they’re more useful than ever. While we were working on the podcast this week, Al Williams and I got into a debate about the utility of logic analyzers.
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