We used the original DigiView from Tech Tools and liked it a lot but eventually found their software too lacking in comms decoding and search features so we changed to a USBee AX. This is a pretty good logic analyser with a single channel scope also built in, but it relies on the USB connection into the PC being very good as the data captures are transferred in real time over the USB link.  If you have a powerful enough PC and directly connect the analyzer it does work and for us getting long but still fast captures of several seconds is often a really important feature.  The USBee software is pretty good, but it can often be quite sluggish when working with large data captures.  Its also often necessary for us to slow down fast SPI busses etc to ensure all of the signal transitions are captured by the USBee, which also always leaves a slight worry when debugging of are you seeing exactly what happened or didn't something get missed the analyser didn't see because it occurred between logging clocks.

In 2015 we've moved back to the DigiView because it seems since we dumped it several years back they have been busy creating a really improved software suite.  If you've not come across them check out the DigiView because apart from their software being very good now they have a really really killer feature the other lower cost logic analysers we've come across don't have – hardware compression. This means that instead of capturing and writing an entry to memory on every capture clock, or transfering over USB on every clock, the DigiViews only store a capture when a change occurs on one of the logic inputs. Its incredibly simple and far far superior to the other method of storing or transferring every capture on every clock. Not only does it mean that the analyser itself can run very fast indeed and still store very long captures to its own local memory because its not storing anthing when nothing has changed (before also transfering it very quickly at the end of the capture), it also means the PC software isn't working with vast data arrays in which relatively little actually changes.

Need A Scope Channel Also?

In that case the DigiView type hardware compression approach doesn't help as you need to be storing data on every clock.  The USBee products are good for this if your PC is fast enough as you can get long captures due to the real time capture transfer to the  PC.  Otherwise you have to live with limited length captures to local analyser memory and the Analog Discovery from Analog Devices is very good for this, especially for its low cost, due to having really good software and a very expensive 14bit ADC in it. It also outputs waveforms which can be very handy.

USEFUL?
We benefit hugely from resources on the web so we decided we should try and give back some of our knowledge and resources to the community by opening up many of our company’s internal notes and libraries through mini sites like this. We hope you find the site helpful.
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