As a few makers pointed out – The Bus Pirate is in our tools section, and today is the last day of our Father’s day sale – so if you use the code “father” on check out you can get the Bus Pirate for 10% off.

Interfacing a new microchip can be a hassle. Breadboarding a circuit, writing code, hauling out the programmer, or maybe even prototyping a PCB. We never seem to get it right on the first try.

The ‘Bus Pirate’ is a universal bus interface that talks to most chips from a PC serial terminal, eliminating a ton of early prototyping effort when working with new or unknown chips. Many serial protocols are supported at 0-5.5volts, more can be added. Adafruit is the official US distributor of Ian Lesnet’s Bus Pirate, each purchase directly supports Dangerous Prototypes! You may also want to pick up a probe set
Protocols:
1-Wire, I2C, SPI, JTAG, asynchronous serial (UART), MIDI, PC keyboard, HD44780 LCDs, and generic 2- and 3-wire libraries for custom protocols.

Features:

• USB interface, USB powered
• 0-5.5volt tolerant pins
• 0-6volt measurement probe
• 1Hz-40MHz frequency measurement
• 1kHz – 4MHz pulse-width modulator, frequency generator
• On-board multi-voltage pull-up resistors
• On-board 3.3volt and 5volt power supplies with software reset
• Macros for common operations
• Bus traffic sniffers (SPI, I2C)
• A bootloader for easy USB firmware updates
• Transparent USB->serial bridge mode
• 10Hz-1MHz low-speed logic analyzer
• Custom support in AVRDUDE, Flashrom
• AVR STK500 v2 programmer clone
• Scriptable from Perl, Python, etc.
• Translations (currently Spanish and Italian)

Documentation & support

• Bus Pirate manual
• The original design document