Usbee Suite Pro

[Hilary Laite]

TheUSBee Suite is powerful electronic signal analysis software for your USBee Test Pod. It starts out as an easy to use Logic Analyzer and Oscilloscope and adds serial bus decoding and world class configurability that lets you solve your electronic problems quickly! Some of the serial busses that are decoded include: I2C, SPI, Async, USB, CAN, 1-Wire, PS/2, SMBus, I2S, Sync Serial and even your own Custom Busses.

You look at a Logic Analyzer / Oscilloscope for extended lengths of time. Why don't you make sure you can enjoy it at the same time? The USBee Suite software lets you choose the look and feel of the interface and saves that information for when you come back to it again.

The USBee Suite Standard is a free download and will run in Demo mode without a USBee, or on any USBee SX, USBee ZX, USBee AX-Standard, USBee AX-Plus, USBee AX-Pro, USBee DX or BusBee Test Pod. So take it for a spin. If it has been a while since you've used your USBee, pull it out of your pocket and experience the power of the USBee Suite.

The USBee Suite Pro builds upon the rich features set of the Standard version and adds high powered capabilities such as Complex Event Searching, PacketPresenter custom packet decoder, Smart Markers, enhanced PacketPresenter API for developers, annotation capabilites, enhanced acquisition control for repeated measurements, display control, analog channel scaling, analog bus decoding, and enhanced file importing and exporting.

Setup of the USBee Suite is fast! Capturing the data you need to solve your problems is just as fast. You can see your design in action with just one click thanks to the easy to use trigger settings, color coded signals and automatic buffer and sample rate settings.

The USBee Suite takes full advantage of the power of each of the various USBee Test Pods. Each USBee comes with the best color coded highly flexible test leads, the best test clips and our signature small and sleek design that can fit right in your pocket. We are proud to say the entire USBee product line is designed and manufactured in the USA!

View your signals like you like them. Want to add decoded bus traffic to the waveforms? Done! Want to delete waves from the screen? Done! Want to reorder waveforms for easier readability? Done! Want to resize the screen for easier reading or more data per screen? Done!

And you like Magenta? Well you can change cursor colors to suite your desires. Waveform backgrounds can also be customized, and you can even give the entire application that cool Glassy look that Windows 7 and Vista has made so popular. Then again, if you like simple, white and black are also available. It's good that white ink cartridges are free!

USBee Suite has decoding support for your favorite serial busses such as I2C, SPI and Async. Bus traffic is decoded in-line with the waveforms and can be displayed on top of, underneath, or instead of the voltage versus time waveform. Just place the cursor over the decoded traffic and get a see-through image that shows you the wiggles that made that byte!

Save your entire data capture to file quickly using the USBee Suite data format to be read back in later for viewing. Or you can export your captured data to data files that you can work with. Want to import your waveform data into Excel? No problem! Just export it as a comma separated file and it imports directly without modification. Need the data in raw binary format? We've got that too!

The USBee Suite operates on our full line of USBee Test Pods, from the 4 channel BusBee and the affordable USBee SX to the USBee DX powerhouse. So if you need more channels or analog capability, you can count on the ease of use and power of the USBee Suite no matter what tool you are using!

at work -- it used to be a factory assembling & repairing electronic devices -- they have a complete room full of dozens of unused supposedly expensive HP oscilloscopes somewhere in the back of a warehouse. They have not been used for years. kinda forgotten there. I asked if i could be donated one to have fun at home but i have been told that even though they are not used now, they are too expensive to be donated to employees. i have not been given a price, but it seems they were paid about several thousands EUR

i have used oscilloscopes back at school, it was kind of fun, but well... playing video games was fun too back then

so i have not used any since high-school and embedded hardware is a recent hobby of mine. basically i am not sure i could do anything with an oscilloscope, and an expensive one feels like it might not be a good option of a n00b like me. not to mention that i doubt the oscilloscope would convert the UP/DOWN signals into usable bytes like wireshark does with network.

Important: i have never read the hundreds pages long of official low level USB norm/protocol definition (what i will call here the "transport protocol"). However i am expert with the targeted peripheral "application-level protocol" i want to see on the device under test while it is operating.

USB Low Layer Protocol

The integrated USB driver of the xxxxxxxxxxx device emulates a RS232 serial port.

The xxxxxxxxxxx device is processed as a Communication Device Class (CDC), in accordance with the "USB Device Class Specifications, version 2.0" available from the web site, in "developers, document" section.

The xxxxxxxxxxx device use the full speed transfer rate 12 Mbits/s, and is compatible with USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 Host Systems or hubs.

on the other post

is it this ? ==> -logic-usbee-ax-usb-blaster/

sorry if i sound stupid, but this is some sort of a "3 in 1" cheap chinese copy, right ? (no offense to chinese ppl)

and it seems the highest sample rate is 24 msps which not enough, so buying this would just be a waste of money

Making a scope is much harder, since you'll need to make a good analog front end. I recently finished a design for a digital power meter AFE and it was surprisingly hard to design even though it only has a 5kHz bandwidth. (The main problems were accuracy and crosstalk.)

The product came after some waiting. The package included just logic analyzer, USB cable and signal cabled (dupont line). The color of the device was black (in original product picture it was white). Interesting that the USB cable that came with the device was Nokia USB cable (KDE-2).

Some of the programs on the software suite worked well, some not entirely correctly and some not at all. Some of the USBEE AX software worked OK, some did not work as expected. For example in logic analyzer program the sample rate settings did not seem to affect anything. Output programs did not work at all. So did not anything that needed analog inputs (scope, multimeter etc..) Simple pulse counting program and frequency counter for example worked as expected.

Maybe I needed some other software that worked better. I saw that the USBEE download page has USBee Suite for DX, AX, ZX, SX and BusBee software. I tried it. The logic analyzer functions in that worked as expected when I set the software to 8 channel logic analyzer mode (turn off oscilloscope channel). I has some problems with 24 MHz sample rate (missing data), but with lower sample speeds everything worked as expected. The Windows tooling is pretty nice, it comes with built-in serial decoding.

Yes. This device is a clone based on CY7C68013. It supports only digital logic analyzer functions. It does not support oscilloscope channels (no input pins for them). It does not seem to support signal output functionality (one feature I was looking when getting another logic analyzer). Considering all the hardware that goes into this product the sales price is cheap. If you try to buy CY7C68013 at small volumes, that IC itself costs more than the price of this whole product.

Other hardware details that I found out was that the device itself runs on 3.3V voltage (there is a linear regulator on the backside of circuit board that regulates USB around 5V to 3.3V). The inputs seems to be implemented with HC245 (if I read the code on IC right because it was in quite unreadable condition) between input pins and CY7C68013. There was 150 ohms series resistor from input pin to HC245, probably to provide some protection. There was also pull-up resistors for each pin (around 100 kohms to 3.3V) to keep the pins up when not connected anywhere. On strange thing: HC245 is a bidirectional bus buffer IC, so I wonder why did they not implement the output in this device because the hardware was already there!

Another thing I found out was that the USBee software license says that you may not use this Software in conjunction with any pod providing similar functionality made by other than CWAV. So using this box with the original software is against the license. So good that I bought this cheaper one and not the more expensive model. The reason why this kind of cheap clones seem to pop up is that the logic analyzer hardware on those is similar to CY7C68013 evaluation board, all that is needed to program the right USB ID into the board to make it being identified the device you want.

This USBEE clone is only designed for TTL level signals.

In case you want to analyze RS-232 signals there is one simple hack to make it work.

Connect a suitable series resistor between RS-232 level signal and logic analyzer input. The resistor will attenuate the signal to levels that can be handled together with the protection diodes on the input buffer IC.

I found that 12 kohms resistors seemed to work OK for this.

No damage to protection diodes (worst case current less than 2 mA though protection diodes) and signal seems to get through nicely (I tested with only 9600 bps serial data but I think works for faster speeds also..)

I monitored the I2C write operation using LA and it is working fine.

But when monitoring the I2C read operation using LA it is not working properly.

In normal I2C read first we send the slave address, ack, register address and then ack and start and read value.

when writing slave address, register address it is working properly.

but when reading value it is always showing 1. Is that due to pull up to keep the pins up when not connected anywhere.

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