The Bus Pirate is a very popular open-source hardware and protocol debugging tool among the electronics community. Dangerous Prototypes, the developer of the Bus Pirate, has announced the launch of the latest version of it. The latest version, Bus Pirate 5, is built around the RP2040 microcontroller from the Raspberry Pi foundation. It also features a color LCD display, a 1–5V programmable power supply with a programmable current limit, an IO buffer, voltage and current measurement, and more.
The first Bus Pirate was launched in 2008, and it has been the go-to tool for testing and debugging multiple bus types such as 1Wire, I2C, SPI, UART, and MIDI. The previous generation of the Bus Pirate was built around the PIC24F core, while the newest one gets the updated dual-core ARM SoC, the RP2040. The RP2040’s PIO blocks make it the perfect candidate for this application. The big colour LCD display gives it a major advantage over its predecessor. Not just the hardware, but the software interface also got an upgrade. The terminal interface has been upgraded from a simple black-and-white text layout to an emulated VT100 colour terminal with a live status bar. The board also contains 18 RGB LEDs and 100MB of usable flash storage.
The Bus Pirate 5 is now available to order from DirtyPCBs for $37.85, and batch 3 is expected to start shipping after February 19th. The hardware design files, and firmware source code are available on the Dangerous Prototypes GitHub repository.
