The Simple GUI for the BitBuster tries to mimick a traditional oscilloscope interface where this is useful, and extends it with a few nice usability features.
You can download the Simple GUI here.
The main view is split in two parts. On the left hand side you can see the main graph view with a smaller orientation graph below it; the right hand side shows several configuration options. Here you set the hostname or IP address of your BitBuster, configure the Sampling Settings and set the main graph zoom levels.
The main graph combines all sampled data into a single view. The notable features are:
Here you can configure the many hardware settings of the BitBuster. Right at the start you can see the you can select the sampling rate and trigger settings. Note that the BitBuster has a memory capacity of 16 megasamples and will always sample this full amount.
You can also set the channel to trigger on; if the trigger is disabled this means “start capturing immediately”, otherwise the BitBuster will wait for the Falling or Rising Edge (or Both) on the select channel, depending on which trigger edge mode is selected. For analog channels, you can also set the threshold that is used to conver the analog channel into a digital one for triggering purposes. The trigger offset allows you to adjust the timing of the capture, with the slider representing the trigger point within the collected sample: By default the BitBuster samples equally many samples before as after the trigger; if you pull the slider to the left, it will sample more data after the trigger, whereas if you pull the slider to the right, you can look further “into the past” and observe more data before the trigger happened.
Furthermore, this is the point where you an configure all channels. For analog channels, you can (other than enabling them) select whether to use the internal challenge slot connector or the external 0.1” / BNC connectors. Furthermore, you can specify the rough minimum and maximum voltages that you’d like to capture here (this will be automatically translated into the respective configuration for the analog amplification pipeline, so your values might be slightly adjusted after saving). Please stay within the minimum / maximum capture range of the BitBuster, namely a center value of ±5V.
For digital channels, you can select which channels to enable.
You have to enable the channel you intend to trigger on.
The BitBuster can sample a maximum of 16 bits per sample, with each analog channel taking 8 bits and each digital channel a single bit. In case you have more than 16 bits enabled, only the first 16 bits will be sampled (but the other channels can be used for e.g. triggering), according to the following order of precedence: Analog Channels, External Digital Channels (0-7), Internal Digital Channels (0-17).
You can use the Save Dump functionality to download the entire capture into multiple files for postprocessing. First select the channel which you’d like to export, then select the location where you’d like the file to be exported. Note that the data will always be exported without any further binary format as 1 sample = 1 byte; for analog channels the byte will be directly the sampled data, for digital channels the GUI will output either 0x00 or 0x01.
Note that the first dump after a sample might take a while (up to about 2 minutes) as the entire sample mmeory will need to be fetched from the BitBuster. Subsequent dumps from the same sample (e.g. for other channels) will then be cached.