Seeedstudio Bus Pirate v4

If you know what this is, you already know you need it.

okay, but, yes, USELESS! There's something going on with dangerous prototypes, they make contradictory references to support, talk of a new board size going forward, only for the version four to be a different board. There is apparently no LCD adapter, which is necessary to work with displays. And don't get me started on cables. The right ones never seem to be around, and with version four, they've not only added pins, they've flipped them around, making version 3.x obsolete. Someday, this may be great. For now, with only updates coming through Github delivery, I see it as largely a waste of time.

This is completely useless, the firmware it ships with is considered "unstable" and won't update in their pirate_loader tool. I couldn't use flashrom over SPI either, because the pins stayed in Hi-Z and the 3.3V power rail was 0V (apparently the solution was to update the firmware!).The documentation and download links are all over the place, I felt like I was going on a wild goose hunt to find them, but I did, because I'm persistent (wasted about 12 hours on this). Then, when I flashed, the flashing software kept erroring out at different places and not finishing; I was never able to succeed in fully flashing it no matter how many times I reset the unit.Apparently, the older Bus Pirate v3.6 is the one you want (not this v4), as it actually works and has a stable firmware. The developers have abandoned this project, so we'll never get stable firmware. Not sure why they would ship this in such a half-baked state to begin with.

The designers have abandoned v4 and are going on to bus pirate Ultra one. The problem was that USB protocol maintenance interrupted the pirate protocols, and CPU peripherals tended to implement fast and efficient versions of their protocols rather than test-and-diagnostic versions. The solution was to implement the pirate protocols in a gate array, which is separate from the CPU. This new version is still in prototype at this writing, and if you need it today, 3.6 is the most supported version.