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Comment by Dries007 | Hacker News Reader

Looks great, only question is why invent your own software when sigrok exists?

There is a driver and firmware for sigrok for using the PI Pico that was posted to Hackaday a while back. It hasn't been merged upstream yet but I got it up and running today just fine building it from source. https://github.com/pico-coder/sigrok-pico

Why build your own logic analyzer when you can buy one Banggood?

This. I own a shitty one from Aliexpress. That and sigrok are better than my old full 4U HP crate I had.

But if you want to build one, why not?

For one thing, the author could have avoided all the work of creating a GUI and lots of protocol analyzers, and thus got his project working faster.

This could have been as simple as writing a sigrok driver, a process which is very easy thanks to some helper scripts and lots of examples.

I found the sigrok website hard to navigate, and never found these examples. I'd love to learn more, as I just threw a decent fast ADC together for fun.

https://sigrok.org/wiki/Developers#Development_guidelines

It's all there, and linked from the wiki's main page, it's just that there's so much of it.

Examples: http://sigrok.org/gitweb/?p=libsigrok.git;a=tree;f=src/hardw...

>But if you want to build one, why not?

That was my point: it's fun to create stuff.

Is Sigrok better than Saleae Logic?

Sigrok is software. Saleae makes hardware.

Saleae Logic is software: https://www.saleae.com/downloads/

I recently tried to run Sigrok on a Windows 11 PC with the Salea clone and I could not find a version that did not crash on the second capture. It seems to run fine on my Mac. So I was flashing the board Windows (due to the new serial to USB chips not being supported under Monterey).

If you run Win11 it might be worth writing a small fast native dedicated capture and display application like this.

Maybe author doesn't like sigrok?

It seems like the author is only aware of "OLS, OpenBench Logic Analyzer", as they mention not liking that as their reasoning for writing their own app.

They added a note to the readme on sigrok crashing. To be fair, I only ever used it on Linux.

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