Quick Setup

Connect Bus Pirate 5

Connect the Bus Pirate to your computer with a USB C cable.

Bus Pirate 5 currently appears as three USB devices:

• USB CDC class device 0: an emulated serial port for accessing the user terminal
• USB CDC class device 1: an emulated serial port for accessing the binary scripting interface
• USB Mass Storage Device: a disk drive interface for accessing onboard storage

These are common device classes and recent operating systems will not request or require a driver. We're living in the future, woohoo!

Find the serial port

tip

Your terminal emulation software will probably detect and list all the available serial ports connected to your computer. If there's more than one serial port, you can connect to each and press enter until you find the Bus Pirate terminal. You can probably skip this step, but if you need to find the port manually follow the instructions below.

Windows

• Press the Windows key or open the start menu
• Type Device Manager
• Click on the Device Manager to open it
• In the Device Manager look for Ports (COM & LPT), expand it
• In the example Bus Pirate 5 is connected as COM3

Linux

Help document the Bus Pirate, post your instructions in the forum and we'll add them to the docs.

macOS

Help document the Bus Pirate, post your instructions in the forum and we'll add them to the docs.

Android

Help document the Bus Pirate, post your instructions in the forum and we'll add them to the docs.

Fire up a terminal emulator

A terminal emulator is software that connects to the Bus Pirate serial interface and displays the command line. Bus Pirate 5 supports VT100 for a colorful interface with a live view statusbar. A fallback monochrome ASCII mode is also available. Most terminal emulators support VT100, it's been around since the 1970s.

Windows

• We're huge fans of Tera Term on Windows. Download and install the latest version.
• Open Tera Term and select Setup then Serial port.
• Choose the Bus Pirate port, and configure it for 115200 (speed), 8 bit (data), None (parity), and 1 bit (stop bits). Click New setting or New Open to open the port.

• Now select Setup then Terminal.
• Configure as shown above. Terminal size 80x24, New-line both set to CR, Terminal ID set to VT100. Click OK.
• To save the settings for next time, choose Setup then Save Settings.

tip

Seeing duplicate characters when you type? Check that local echo is unchecked in this menu.

• Press Enter in the terminal.
• The Bus Pirate will prompt you to choose VT100 color mode or the fallback ASCII monochrome mode.
• We recommend you type y followed by the enter key.

You should see something like this. Congratulations, you're talking to the Bus Pirate!

Linux

Help document the Bus Pirate, post your instructions in the forum and we'll add them to the docs.

macOS

Help document the Bus Pirate, post your instructions in the forum and we'll add them to the docs.

Android

Help document the Bus Pirate, post your instructions in the forum and we'll add them to the docs.

caution

If you see lots of extra garbage characters in the terminal that is probably the VT100 code that updates the live view statusbar. Verify that your terminal supports VT100 mode and that VT100 mode is enabled.