Setting up Logic Analyzer 24MHz 8 Channels
I recently purchased a cheap Logic Analyzer 24 MHz 8 channel. In this article, I want to share how I set up the device to analyze signals from GPIO. This setup will be done on Windows 10 64 Machine.
What is Logic Analyzer
A logic analyzer is an electronic instrument that captures and displays multiple signals from a digital system or digital circuit. it comes in many sizes and features, depending on the needs. Logic Analyzer is very useful if you want to verify whether your digital system produces the correct signal, such as debugging serial connection.
Cheap Logic Analyzer 24MHz 8 channels
I recently purchased a really cheap Logic Analyzer for IDR95,000 in Tokopedia. It comes with the main board, USB Cable, and Female-Female jumper. It was wrapped inside a plastic envelope
As you see, it comes with some Chinese characters which I don't understand. It does not have any brand or series so it can be really difficult to work with it, especially if you want to find documentation, driver, or software on the internet.
Installing the driver
Plugging the logic analyzer into the USB port, you will see there will be a red LED turned on on the logic analyzer.
In the device manager, the logic analyzer will be shown as an unknown device
I’ve tried a couple of drivers such as Zadig and Saleae. In this article, I’m going to use the Saleae driver because I cannot use the Zadig driver due to the system policy on my machine not allowing an unrecognized driver to be installed (I use my office PC)
First, we need to download the driver. You can download the driver on this page https://support.saleae.com/logic-software/driver-install and click the link to Saleae-Logic-Drivers.zip as seen in the picture below
After you unzip the zip file. go to your device manager and right-click on your Unknown Device and select Update driver
Click the Browse my computer for drivers. On the next page, click Let me pick from a list of available drivers on my computer as highlighted in the picture below
After that, a list of common hardware types will be shown. Select Universal Serial Bus controllers as shown in the image below, and click Next
After that, click Have Disk button as shown below
It will show you windows to select the disk location as shown below, just click the Browse button
After that, locate Saleae.inf inside the Saleae-Logic-Driver folder that you just downloaded. Normally it will be inside Saleae-Logic-Driver/Drivers/Saleae.inf. Select the file and click Open
After that, just click OK button as shown below
The Saleae Logic USB Logic Analyzer will be shown as an item in the list of Models as shown in the image below. Just click Next
After that, the installation will be started, and if nothing goes wrong, you will see a success report as shown in the image below.
After you close the window, your Logic Analyzer will be shown as one of USB Controller in the Device manager as seen in the image below
Installing PulseView
Now we need software that uses the Logic Analyzer to read the signal, analyze, and display the signal for us. The software that I use is PulseView, which is open-source software for Logic Analyzer. It supports many models of Logic Analyzer including the Cheap logic analyzer that we are using.
First, download the installer here http://sigrok.org/wiki/Downloads
Make sure you download the Release build installer, as the nightly installer seems to be corrupted at the time I write this article. You can choose to download the 32-bit or 64-bit depending on your machine.
After that, just launch the installer and just click Yes or OK in every step of the installation (except of course if you want to read the license agreement, you can take your time)
Once the installation is finished, you can open the PulseView from Start Windows. One issue I encountered that you may encounter in this step is the PulseView is immediately close after some loading window is shown. To resolve that, simply disconnect any USB devices from your machine and relaunch PulseView. You can reconnect the other USB devices once the PulseView is fully opened
As shown in the image above, that is the view of the PulseView. One important thing you have to check is to make sure that you can see the Saleae Logic as highlighted above. It means that your Logic Analyzer is recognized by the PulseView.
From here, you can start using the Logic Analyzer to analyze your signal and start changing the world, or fix your bug :)
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