April 14, 2022

Logic Analyzers - Sigrok

This seems to be an active and diverse project that may support one or both of the logic analyzer devices I have (and as it turns out, it does nicely). It is available via a multitude of Fedora packages.

Just installing sigrok fails. But installing pulseview seems to be what I want to do:

dnf install pulseview
Installing:
 pulseview              x86_64        0.4.2-9.fc35          fedora        745 k
Installing dependencies:
 libserialport          x86_64        0.1.1-12.fc35         fedora         33 k
 libsigrok              x86_64        0.5.2-6.fc35          fedora        454 k
 libsigrok-cxx          x86_64        0.5.2-6.fc35          fedora         90 k
 libsigrokdecode        x86_64        0.5.3-11.fc35         fedora        320 k
Pulseview is a Qt based GUI for sigrok and is part of the sigrok "software suite". It turns out to be exactly what I want. The Sparkfun tutorial is nice. I discover I can zoom in using the mouse wheel once I put the cursor on a place on the waveform I am interested in.

So far I am quite pleased with pulseview and sigrok. I find myself itching for a startup file of some kind. I would like to tell it that I always use a OLS device and that I only have 8 or 16 channels.

Quick first experiments

I type "pulseview" to start it up.

I see a place labeled "Demo device", clicking on it bring up a "Connect to Device" dialog.
Step 1 is to "choose the driver" and I select Open Workbench and SUMP compatibles.
I then plug in my device
Step 2 is "select the interface" and I choose USB. This is a mistake. I need to select "Serial Port" and then /dev/ttyACM0. It actually finds ttyACM0 automatically when I do that.
Step 3 is "Scan for devices" - this is just a button. I click it and the box below get filled with a single entry, namely:

Open Logic sniffer v1.01 with 32 channels

I type "OK" and the dialog finishes. I type "Run" and I see an LED on the device come on briefly and then the display refreshes. There is a menu to set the sample rate. I change it and play with the device. No nasty errors. Now I just need a signal source and then spend some time with the manual.


Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Electronics pages / tom@mmto.org