Bus Pirate is one of the most popular hardware debugging multi-tool used by the electronics community. It was originally developed by Ian Lesnet in 2008 for the purpose of programming, debugging, and analysing microcontrollers and other ICs. Over the years the tool got numerous upgrades and the last version was the Bus Pirate 5, which featured an RP2040. As the Raspberry Pi Foundation released their new RP2350 chip recently, the developers of Bus Pirate didn’t waste any time and just announced the all new versions of Bus Pirate, Bus Pirate 5XL and Bus Pirate 6 featuring the newly introduced RP2350 microcontroller. They have taken advantage of the Raspberry Pi’s beta program and were able to secure some chips prior to their release for the expedited development of the new Bus Pirate variants.
The Bus Pirate 5XL features an RP2350A while the Bus Pirate 6 features an RP2350B. With the higher pincount RP2350B, the Bus Pirate 6 Feature has an additional 8 pins with a Look behind buffer feature, which can be used as an always running logic analyzer. The all new improved M33 core along with the increased SRAM and additional PIO state machines are definitely going to improve the device's performance much better. Apart from these new upgrades, the new variants keep the best of version 5 and offer features such as voltage and current measurement, programmable power supply, programmable current limit, IPS display and buffered IOs. Both variants are available to purchase from the DirtyPCBs website with a price tag of $63.50 for Bus Pirate 5XL and $82.50 for Bus Pirate 6. More information about the Bus Pirate 5, 5XL, and 6 can be found on their wiki page. Additionally, the opensource hardware design files and firmware source source are available on their GitHub repo.
