Saleae Logic — Gentoo Linux

Certain company’s to me deserve my cash.. and that’s not easy.
Saleae is one of them. Saleae produces logic analyzer’s and 8 channel and a  16 channel version.

Logic analyzers are quite common and most of them are desk side stand alone units. Where Saleae differs is there logic analyzer  connects to your USB port.
Whats even better is this…

$ file Logic
Logic: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.15, stripped

That’s right, the software that interfaces the to the logic unit has a NATIVE Linux port. In fact there is a native version for Windows,Mac and Linux in both 32bit and 64bit! Not some shitty wine app or java rubbish its a pure native port and it works very well on every operating system. You can see why I like Saleae now!

Before you ask, in no way did Saleae make me or ask me to write about there device, I am doing it because its amazing.

I have brought the 8 channel version as I can’t see my self needing anymore channels then 8 but you can always have more then one right!

There is also another reason why I like Saleae’s product.
Its well made, comes in a nice case and is VERY small
You can see the logic and its attached probes in the below image.

That’s a standard SD card in the image to show you how small the logic really is.
Saleae also include the little probe clips, but you can just plug the end of the wires into a pin header if you want to.

The main set of 8 wires easily unplugs from the main logic unit to store easily in the provided case.

Now time to make it work!

To get the Logic detected under Linux you will need very little.
1) Kernel support for Cypress FX2.
2) LibUSB 0.1 (Legacy).

For number 1 You need to add FTDI_SIO support to your kernel :

CONFIG_USB_SERIAL_FTDI_SIO=m

For number 2 you need to emerge the following package :

dev-libs/libusb-compat

Once you have the above two things, go ahead and plug the, if all has gone well dmesg will print something like this :

[950447.239197] usb 1-1.5.2: new high-speed USB device number 14 using ehci-pci
[950447.324654] usb 1-1.5.2: New USB device found, idVendor=0925, idProduct=3881
[950447.324658] usb 1-1.5.2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[950447.324662] usb 1-1.5.2: Product: Logic
[950447.324672] usb 1-1.5.2: Manufacturer: Saleae LLC

Now that your Logic is detected go do the download page and get your software.  The Linux package is labeled as “ubuntu”. Lucky for the rest of us Linux people its just a zip file that you can unpack anywhere and run the Logic application.
I like to extract it under /opt but you can run it anywhere you like.

You can see in the below image a test I did with my logic, the software interface is clean and easy to use but feature rich.
Click the above to get a higher res image.