Were you among the crowd of attendees at Colin O’Flynn’s presentation “USSSSB: Talking USB from Python" at ESC Silicon Valley? Jacob Beningo, CSDP, president/consultant for EDN Network, attended O’Flynn’s presentation and agrees, the Total Phase Beagle USB Protocol Analyzer is among the Most Useful Tools for USB Developers. Here's the excerpt from Jacob’s most recent article about the tools he finds most useful for USB debugging and development:

"A software protocol analyzer is a great tool provided that the PC is able to recognize the USB device. In an event where the USB clock is off and unable to enumerate, though, a software analyzer isn’t going to be very useful for debugging. Fortunately there is also a hardware protocol analyzer available to embedded developers working with USB. One example is the Total Phase Beagle USB protocol analyzer. The Beagle High Speed (Beagle USB 480 Protocol Analyzer) version costs just a hair over $1000, which is well worth it given the amount of time a debug session could take without the right tools. The Beagle is a hardware protocol analyzer that monitors the bus traffic on the physical pins and is able to not only record but also decode USB traffic in real-time."

Figure 1:Beagle USB 480 Protocol Analyzer	Figure 2: Beagle USB 480 Front Ports

The Beagle USB analyzers are hardware–based USB analyzers that offer a number of advantages over software-based analyzers, such as:

• Independent; not affected by host computer
• Ability to debug embedded hosts
• Detection of:

  • Speed negotiation
  • Low-level bus events
  • Timing issues
  • Transmission errors

• Cross-platform support (GUI runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X)

In addition, the Total Phase Data Center Software, connected to the Beagle analyzer, gives you the ability to monitor, display and filter data in real-time. Data can be parsed, filtered, and for high-speed devices, class-level decoding can be applied, all in real-time. For more complex trouble-shooting, triggers can be set on certain Beagle analyzer models, and digital I/Os can be configured to synchronize with external logic.

Do you have the right tools for the job? Total Phase offers a range of protocol analyzers - check our USB Analyzer Product Guide and see what we have to offer for low, full- and high-speeds, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0.

Additional resources that you may find helpful include the following: