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Bus Pirate 5 Firmware Guide

Bus Pirate 5 is the universal serial interface tool designed by hackers, for hackers. It's crammed full of hardware and firmware features that make probing chips pleasant and easy.

  • LCD - A beautiful 240x320 pixel color IPS (all angle viewing) LCD acts as a pin label, while also showing the voltage on each pin and the current consumption of the programmable power supply unit.
  • 16 RGB LEDs - It's customary to have an indicator LED, so to check that box we added 16 SK6812 RGB LEDs.
  • Just one button - 16 party LEDs but just one button!
info

This is a general overview of Bus Pirate 5. See the hardware manual for technical details.

Main connector

  • 2.54mm 10 pin connector - A keyed locking connector that works just as well with common jumper wires and 2.54mm 'DuPont' style connectors.
PinLabelDescription
1VOUT/VREFPin supplies 1-5volts up to 400mA with current limit and resetable fuse (VOUT) OR connects an external voltage source to the Bus Pirate IO interface
2-9IO0 - IO7Buffered IO pins with voltage measurement and optional 10K pull-up resistors
10GNDGround pin

Auxiliary connector

  • 1mm 9 pin connector - Intended as a tap point for a logic analyzer. No more trying to balance two or three probes on a single pin, just tap the bus activity from this secondary header.
PinLabelDescription
1-8IO0 - IO7Buffered IO pins with voltage measurement and optional 10K pull-up resistors
9GNDGround pin

TF Flash Card Socket

  • TF flash card socket - When plugged into a PC USB port, the TF flash card appears as a readable and writable disk drive.

  • TF flash card storage is used to save global and mode configuration preferences in simple JSON files.

USB C connector

  • Modern USB C connector. Only RP2040 supported USB modes are available.

Bootloader button

  • Normally you just hit the $ key in the Bus Pirate terminal to enter bootloader mode for firmware upgrades. You can also use the button on the bottom to activate the bootloader manually.

JTAG debug header

  • A three pin debugging port is exposed on the bottom of the board. See the development section for more info on developing for the Bus Pirate.
PinLabelDescription
1GNDGround connection (furthest from the edge of the PCB/case)
2SWDIOJTAG Data IO
3SWCLKJTAG Clock (closest to the edge of the PCB/case)

VT100

  • VT100 terminal emulation supports color and a live statusbar view of the voltage and functions on each pin.

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Other Documentation

Bus Pirate 5 documentation is broken into hardware and firmware sections so it can be versioned easily with each update. Here's some other fun stuff you might enjoy.