qwertykeyboard wrote:
I don't own an oscilloscope, so would it be useful to buy a cheap little logic analyzer...to do debugging and that type of stuff.
For $12 I don't see how it can hurt! In fact, I have one of these sitting in my toolbox, though I've never actually used it.
One thing it's very important to keep in mind with logic analyzers and similar equipment is that they convert analogue signals digital before you ever see them, so if there's a problem in the analogue domain that affects digital signals, you're not going to see it directly. For example, if a signal level is dodgy such that what's supposed to be a 1 is sometimes misinterpreted as a 0, or a clock waveform is dirty, you'll never see that. And if the thresholds at which the LA distinguishes 1 and 0 are different from those of the actual hardware reading the signal, your LA will show different data from what the part under test is actually seeing.
Worry about levels was actually one of the reasons I built
this logic probe the way I did: it shows "definitely on," "definitely off" and "neither" and lets me exactly adjust the levels for each state.