Hacking software

[FrankT]

After spending time capturing waveforms, hand converting them to bits, then to hex, then flipping the bit order, then flipping the byte order, I was wondering if there is software out there that does all of this?

I ended up writing a perl script to convert the scope captured waveforms to binary.

I then wrote a C++ windows program that displayed the data in binary and changed the colour of the bits that where changing in real time so I could see patterns.

And now I'm capturing some FSK data, and viewing it in realterm, but the character set is 0-A, 1-B, 2-C, etc so I need to translate the data I am viewing.

[codeboy2k]

You won't be able to get away without any programming effort, but there are tools to manipulate, display and simulate with captured data and real-world connections, and make it somewhat easier to deal with.

In the past I have used MATLAB and Simulink (http://www.mathworks.com/). Since I don't work for a big name company anymore, I don't have any license for it. So lately I've been using GNU Octave on Linux.  It's mostly MATLAB compatible.  There is also FreeMat (http://freemat.sourceforge.net/), and SciLab with XCOS simulator (http://www.scilab.org/), which I am not familiar with but I plan to look at too.

As for your choice of Perl .... my god.. I know it's powerful, but it's so easy to shoot yourself in the foot, and with 9 ways to do the same thing... I just gave up on Perl  years ago.  And I know it well.. I was around when Larry Wall released it and it was magical back then.  There are much better languages to use now.