Tom Nardi at Hackaday gets hands-on with the newly released Bus Pirate 5, based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040 chip.

I was able to grab one of the first all-new Bus Pirates off the production line in January, and have been spending the last week or so playing around with it. While there’s definitely room for improvement on the software side of things, the hardware is extremely promising, and I’m very excited to be see how this new chapter in the Bus Pirate story plays out.

…you don’t have to look inside the Bus Pirate 5 to see the most obvious new feature. The ST7789V 240 x 320 IPS LCD is front and center, and acts as a multi-purpose display depending on what the device is doing. Most of the time, it functions as a dynamic label, showing what each pin does given the current mode that the Bus Pirate is in. For example, when you switch to UART mode, you’ll instantly be able to see which pins have been set to TX and RX.

You don’t need any special software to access the Bus Pirate interface; just open up your favorite serial terminal and point it to the USB device that’s created when you plug it in. If you’re using a Chrome-based browser you can even connect to it via the Web Serial API.

The software is under active development with nightly builds for feature testing.

Check out the article with videos on Hackaday here.