May 19, 2022

FPGA - Open Workbench Logic Sniffer

People like to abbreviate this "OLS", not "owb" as I sometimes do. I bought one of these years ago (before they vanished from the face of the earth). Mine worked well the one time I used it.

It is based on the XC3S250E chip from Xilinx. This is a Spartan 3E FPGA.

I thought I would like to study the firmware for the FPGA, now that I am interested in such things, but to my consternation, the above Github repo does not seem to include the verilog for the chip. It has a bunch of Java code (maybe they only archived whatever miserable Java GUI they worked up). The Sigrok page describes it as "fully open source" but it looks to me like that source has been lost and misplaced.

This "Papilio One OLS" looks like a predecessor or close relative to the OLS.

Pepino

The Pepino project ported the OLS code (where did they get it from?) to the Pepino. The Pepino is apparently a board based on the Spartan 6 FPGA, so it ought to be more capable than the Spartan 3E on the OLS. They make public all their sources as a zip file.

FPGA logic analyzers

Do a search on this, and add perhaps the word "github" and lots of things turn up.

In the machine shop world, everyone who gets a lathe seems to want to make a brass canon.
Perhaps in the FPGA world, everyone wants to make a logic analyzer.


Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org