Referral for a Saleae Logic Pro 16 discount?

[Rigby]

I have a Logic Pro 16 and it is, by far, the best money I've spent on test equipment in the past two years, in terms of bang per buck.

You shouldn't feel too bad if you have to pay full price.  It is well worth that money.

[janoc]

I have the ols, its expandable to 32 chans.. but the software is clunky, and only has 24K sample memory. easy to fill it fast even with rll..

Does the RLL actually work for you? Because it doesn't seem to with mine. BTW, Sigrok seems like a better client for it, give it a shot. 

watch those clones with the saleae software, supposedly they are working on making the software not work with the clones anymore..

I wouldn't be too worried about the classic Logic clones (the 24MHz ones). There isn't much they can do about those because the hardware is so primitive - Cypress EZ-USB chip, with firmware downloaded on the fly. They have tried to break these by relying on some clones having a slow EEPROM and refusing to work if that was detected by reading 3x quickly in sequence. That is trivially worked around and probably most cloners have replaced the chip for a faster one already.

I don't know about the new Logic 8, Logic Pro series.

[0xdeadbeef]

Does the RLL actually work for you? Because it doesn't seem to with mine. BTW, Sigrok seems like a better client for it, give it a shot.

Well, the run length encoding works perfectly well with either the Java Client or OLSFront. Dunno about Sigrok. Supporting everything under the sun comes with a price. E.g. for the ScanaPlus, Sigrok doesn't seem to support any kind of triggering - since the triggering for streaming LAs is usually done by the software. I'd be also suprised to learn that Sigrok is able to use all of the OLS capabilities (e.g. trigger setup), so maybe they screwed the RLE function as well.

Anyway, regarding the of OLS RLE, you need to know how it works to make proper use of it. In a nutshell, in RLE mode one channel is used as RLE marker and is lost for capturing.
So if you set it up to capture 8 channels (one byte per capture) only 7bits will contain channel data and 1 bit says if the next byte contains the number of repetitions.
This obviously also means that with an 8ch setup, the RLE is not very effective since the maximum repetition is 256. I.e. if you have no signal change on the channels for more than 256 capture events, it will still need to store another two bytes (one for the data + RLE bit and one for the repetition number).
So in most cases, it makes sense to capture 16ch because then the number of repetitions that can be stored is increased to 65536. For very rare signal bursts, it can also make sense to use 32ch.
Yet obviously, increasing the bit width to store less RLE info during static phases means you need more bytes to store if there is a signal change. So experimenting with the number of channels captures (at least 8/16/32) makes sense to find out which setup is able to capture the longest duration.

[jadew]

@0xdeadbeef

Hey, you're right about OLSFront, I stopped working on it and I don't think it will see any further development - there's really no incentive for me to spend additional time on this project.

I've considered making a commercial spin-off (complete redesign), that would be feature packed and would support various hardware, but I'm not sure there's a market for something like this and I've been turned off by the rampant feature-copying going around: see how ScanaLogic basically copied the JS based protocol decoding idea from me + some other things that look/feel strikingly the same - morality aside, it's in poor taste and I'm not sure I want to deal with this kind of garbage.

About the RLE mode, it is working, but I think there is a bug in the core of the FPGA, because sometimes it starts spewing out random data regardless of which client is being used. I considered designing my own hardware as well, but given how bad the cloning situation is, I don't think that's a very lucrative business, either.

Anyway, I think currently the choices are very limited for the hobby market and if you factor in the price too, extremely poor. I don't think this will change anytime soon, but for anyone looking for a LA, I can tell you this:

1) The software matters a lot.
2) Infinite memory is good.
3) 8 channels is not enough.
4) Anything under 100 Msps is not fast enough.

That being said, I'm not a fan of the Saleae software but I think it's better than most, so if you can deal with the price, it's probably the best option you have at the moment.

[amyk]

The newer Logic Pro series isn't cloned (AFAIK), as that is way more complex.

Actually...

http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/LA5016-Logic-Analyzer-p-2219.html

...they've already cloned the hardware and the software, including the SDK for the protocol decoders.

[0xdeadbeef]

Hey, you're right about OLSFront, I stopped working on it and I don't think it will see any further development - there's really no incentive for me to spend additional time on this project.

It's a bit sad as I preferred OLSFront over the Java GUI and kinda hoped it would support the advanced trigger features some day, but having several idling projects myself, I fully understand this
And yeah, as I said I moved on to the ScanaPlus in spring of 2014 as I came to the conclusion that development for OLS has generally slowed down to a full stop.

see how ScanaLogic basically copied the JS based protocol decoding idea from me + some other things that look/feel strikingly the same - morality aside, it's in poor taste and I'm not sure I want to deal with this kind of garbage.

I must admit I suggested the auto measuring for periods with screenshots of OLSFront in the ScanaLogic forums, but it existed in the Java OLS GUI before OLSFront and I don't think that taking over good ideas is generally unethical. About the protocol decoding through JavaScript: indeed it existed in OLSFront before ScanStudio V2 AFAIK, but even if this is not a coincidence: if they didn't copy the API or decoder scripts (which I dunno), I would count this as taking over good ideas as well.

About the RLE mode, it is working, but I think there is a bug in the core of the FPGA, because sometimes it starts spewing out random data regardless of which client is being used. I considered designing my own hardware as well, but given how bad the cloning situation is, I don't think that's a very lucrative business, either.

You probably have a deeper insight into the actual communication as I can only judge the user side of things and never observed this. What I can say though is that the trigger position is more or less random in RLE mode. Then again it's probably tricky to implement this correctly if you don't actually know how much memory you will need for the coming data to be sampled.

[Mr Simpleton]

Depending on needs, the Intronix may be a not so expensive alternative...
http://www.pctestinstruments.com/index.htm

[jadew]

What I can say though is that the trigger position is more or less random in RLE mode. Then again it's probably tricky to implement this correctly if you don't actually know how much memory you will need for the coming data to be sampled.

Yes, this is something that has been bothering me as well. Shouldn't be that hard to implement it in the FPGA, but I don't think anyone is working on that either

About the advanced triggers, I intended to implement them, however at the time I didn't have a good understanding of FPGAs (this has changed now) and the only code provided to work with them was under some opensource license that was conflicting with the closed source nature of my software, so I gave up on the idea.

Edit: corrected a typo.

[ikalogic]

I've been turned off by the rampant feature-copying going around: see how ScanaLogic basically copied the JS based protocol decoding idea from me + some other things that look/feel strikingly the same - morality aside, it's in poor taste and I'm not sure I want to deal with this kind of garbage.

@jadew,

I don't know who who you are, really, and i certainly didn't know about your ideas about JavaScript decoding. You should have patented them and should have paid an attorny to sue me now!

Joking aside, we're a small company working very hard day and night, growing up year after year, making good things, and sometimes not very good things, but we learn from our mistakes as much as we can.

The JavaScript system i am using is simply "the" best alternative I had in my developement framework which is Qt. You didn't invent it, did you?

I do respect a lot my competitors like Saleae, i think they have a great team, and their presence in the market is part of the game. Some of the features i see in their software seems inspired from our software, but that's life! we do the same. I wish Saleae success as much as i wish our own success, i am sure there's room for both of us in that market.

I wish you also success in your spin-off!