Question from the Customer:
My consulting firm just got a large contract. We’ll be testing and verifying a setup for high volume sales for airport stakeholders. The system consists of a cash register, a tablet, and printer, and connectivity to the server farm. To better monitor transactions and provide real-time information, this project is moving the data exchange from an RS232 bus to a high-speed USB bus. Here’s a diagram of what we’ll be testing.
- The printer is a slave device.
- The cash register and the tablet are master devices
- The server farm manages flight and service information
The tablet has important tasks to run:
- Sniff the communication between the Cash Register and the Printer
- Capture the data of the printed receipt
- Interface with the servers for information related to the sale: flight information and any additional services (first boarding, insurance, additional baggage, etc.)
To verify the functionality of this system, we need to non-intrusively capture USB traffic sent from the cash register to the printer. For all our other projects, we have been using the Beagle USB 12 Protocol Analyzer. We used the same analyzer for our initial evaluation using similar devices at Low/Full USB speeds, but we’re not sure the Beagle USB 12 analyzer is fast enough for testing the actual devices to be used in the system. As implied in the diagram, we will be using several analyzers during final verification and customer acceptance testing, one for each printer. We need to be cost-effective – which analyzer do you recommend for this project? Also, we’ll need to accumulate and analyze a lot of information during verification - how can we manage that?
Response from Technical Support:Thanks for your questions! Regarding which analyzer to used, we have two suggestions about Beagle USB protocol analyzers for your project. We also have a recommendation for data storage.
For high speed sniffing, as you observed, the Beagle 12 Protocol Analyze is designed for a Low/Full speed USB bus. To monitor this set up, we recommend using the High-speed Beagle USB 480 Protocol Analyzer. However, the tablet may not be able to fulfill the power requirements of the Beagle USB 480 analyzer. If that proves to be the case, we recommend using the Beagle USB 480 analyzer with an external computer. For data storage, you can store the traffic on PC RAM using the Data Center Software and then export or save trace files for future review. Additionally you can use the Beagle API Software to capture and log data directly to a hard drive.We hope this answers your questions. Additional resources that you may find helpful include the following:
- Beagle Protocol Analyzer User Manual
- Beagle API Documentation
- Data Center Protocol Analyzer Software User Manual
More questions? More projects? You can contact us and request a demo that applies to your application, as well as ask questions about protocol analyzers and other Total Phase products.