The trickiest part here is the host side rather than the hardware: getting the Windows toolchain talking to the board. The maker works through it step by step, installing Python, pulling the LogicAnalyzer release from GitHub, and editing a config file to hold the path to the python313.dll library. Once that is done, the firmware UF2 goes straight onto the Pico and the board shows up as a COM device. I think laying the setup out in that order is the smartest part of the whole walkthrough, since that is where most people get stuck.
The hardware itself stays beautifully simple. One Raspberry Pi Pico is the core, giving 24 capture channels running at 100MHz, with inputs 1 through 24 mapped onto specific GPIO pins. Everything runs under the open-source LogicAnalyzer v6.0 software.
The results are what sold me. A UART test at 9600 baud shows ASCII text strings arriving cleanly. An I2C bus decodes at 400 kHz, with the address 0x3C picked out of the traffic. A 1-Wire run against a DS18B20 temperature sensor shows presence pulses, ROM search commands and the 28h family code. An ESP32 and an OLED display also appear in one of the setups.
One trade-off is worth flagging: the firmware and software versions need to line up. When they drift apart, the tool reports an error starting the capture. There is also a mention of a Pico2 with input buffers for testing, but no detail on how that variant performs, so how it compares to the plain Pico remains an open question for me.
Project by made by morten. Watch it on their YouTube channel: