Bus Pirate
More info
- Creator
- Ian Lesnet (Dangerous Prototypes)
- Released
- 2008
- Type
- Debugging tool, open hardware
A small USB board that lets you talk I²C, SPI or UART to an unfamiliar chip by typing commands into a terminal.
Ian Lesnet built it in 2008 and it became the flagship of his open-hardware outfit Dangerous Prototypes. The idea is to avoid writing firmware just to find out whether a sensor answers: hook it up, pick a protocol, type a few bytes in a terse text syntax and read what comes back. It also speaks 1-Wire, supplies power and can switch on pull-up resistors.
It found fans among electronics hobbyists and among people taking routers apart to find an open console port or dump an SPI flash. The fifth generation, released in 2024, moved to the RP2040 and gained a screen of its own. It does not replace a logic analyzer — it tells you what the chip says, not why the waveform looks the way it does.