Raspberry Pi just released a new chip: RP2350A/B. Yup, we've got boards. Read about it, or click below to get one:

• Bus Pirate 5XL
• Bus Pirate 6

Bus Pirate 5 REV10 is ready! The next generation of Bus Pirate is here.

Type simple commands in a terminal and talk to chips over 1-Wire, I2C, SPI, UART, and more. Figure out how a chip works before writing a line of code.

Hardware specs

Bus Pirate 5 comes with extra button caps. A color master at a clothing accessory factory dyed white caps to match red, yellow and blue retro arcade buttons.

We also tried a hydrographic dip dye factory and made button caps with a carbon fiber pattern.

A silkscreen on the main IO header clearly marks the pinout for faster and easier connections. This tricky job was done by an Uncle who specializes in silkscreens on wireless ear pods.

Bus Pirate 5 is sealed with a “genuine” quality assurance "Scratch and Sniff" sticker. Our custom scent was too thin to be encapsulated and printed, but the factory helped us thicken it with a common cosmetics material.

We tried to make the ultimate probe cable with really nice silicone coated wire. Leads are labeled and color coded. 2.54mm DuPont crimps work with lots of common, less expensive test probes.

A pogo pin factory made precision milled breadboard adapter pins for the probe cable. One side fits the probe cable, the other inserts into a breadboard or female header. Tiny but handy!

An auxiliary cable connects the Bus Pirate to external tools like a logic analyzer. It’s difficult to tell the tiny wires apart, so we found white crimp housings and dyed them to match the probe cable.

After months of delays and thousands of rejects, the injection molded enclosure is done! The final batch is beautiful, but plastic creep in the insert nuts sent us scrambling to find non-standard 7mm bolts.

A last-minute change from an SD card to NAND flash storage left a gaping hole in the enclosure. It was far too late to change the tooling, so we SLA 3D printed a tiny plug to fill the unused slot.

Sometimes you want to connect a wire and go, so we made a Bus Pirate KF141 quick connect adapter. A pinout silkscreen in bright orange matches the KF141 levers.

RPi Pico is great, but the tiny misaligned pin labels are not. We asked Uncle to silkscreen the Pico pinout on 20p headers when we sent KF141s. We picked the best header out of 10 manufacturers and used a two-part silkscreen process that's extra sharp.

Custom boxes have big MOQs and take up loads of space. Bus Pirate 5 is packed in a highly recyclable brown box, then wrapped with a custom bento box takeaway label. This kind of printing is cheap, looks great, and has super low minimum quantities.

Thank you for following along these past few months. Now, I'll resume building out the firmware and packing in features. There's several JTAG things in the pipeline, man in the middle attacks, @MoonbaseOtago's oscilloscope, and more.

Resources

• User Guide, tutorials, translation, development
• Hardware design, enclosure, manufacturing details
• Forum and live chat

Social

• Mastodon
• Instagram
• BlueSky
• Twitter

Sjaak (SMD Prutser) and Ian (Dangerous Prototypes) have been rolling a "next generation" Bus Pirate for nearly five years. It's been a strange trip, but 15 years after the first Bus Pirate we are ready with a fresh, hip, powerful new design.

2017 Bus Pirate moves to ARM - Several revisions of an ARM STM32-based Bus Pirate appear on the infamous "blue pill" development board. The firmware is tight, having been developed by Sjaak.

2018 Bus Pirate gets an FPGA - An ICE40 FPGA is bolted onto the ARM, giving total flexibility over pin assignments, a fast logic analyzer and more. A clunky case with Cherry MX switches and under-lighting rounds off a pretty formidable design.

2019 Failure to launch - It's fall of 2019 and we're ready go! Instead, things get weird and we can't source the STM32s. It also seems like a less than idea time to launch such an expensive and complex design, so we put it back on the shelf.

2021 Bus PIrate - Raspberry Pi announces the RP2040 chip. It's cheap, has great features and the PIO module looks super useful for interfacing just about anything. We roll a board to be "supply chain proof", using only common parts available from multiple manufacturers.

2022 DACs, Buffers, Logic - In the fall of 2022 we're once again ready to launch a new design. Unfortunately the electronics supply chain once again had other ideas. First it was a DAC chip. Six different compatible ICs from two manufacturers are suddenly unobtainable. We rolled a new revision without it, but then the buffer and logic ICs became scarce.

Today - Supply chains are healing, all the parts we need are available and China is open for visitors. It is finally happening, Bus Pirate 5 will be shipping in the next few weeks!