TURN A LOGIC ANALYZER into A SIGNAL GENERATOR using only software

One thing we learned by viewing [Alton Brown] on all of those good Eats episodes is that a multitasker is way better than a unitasker. [Joost] is thinking along the same lines by taking a fantastic tool and adding a helpful function to it. His software project turns a USB Saleae Logic Analyzer into a signal generator.

There are already a multitude of reasons to own one of these fantastic tools. but the ability to use it to generate up to 8 channels of PWM signals is a welcome addition. It is capable of producing frequencies from 1Hz up to 1MHz at a sample rate of 4 MHz. It uses the original SDK and doesn’t require any changes to the hardware (we would’ve thought new firmware was necessary, but happily that’s not the case). The one caveat is that best now this only works with Windows machines running the .NET version 3.5 or higher. It looks like an MSI installer package is all that’s available for download so the thoughts of easily porting this to other operating systems have been dashed unless [Joost] chooses to share his source code.

Edit 7/12/2016: [Joost]’s website is down, but he moved it to Github.