exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

It's a little more than 10GBP, but I'm very happy with my DSLogic USB LA.

I used both a Logic 8 and a Logic Pro 16 from Saleae. I did test a bunch of cheap ones (up to 32 channel like exxos, we had the same one) just to see them fail miserably and not work as expected. I think buying the Saleae Logic Pro 16 was the best thing I did to help me debug the 68020 board.
If you're only doing tests on Arduino and slow micro-controllers, the cheap LA might be ok (assuming they have proper input protection), but after that, if you need to do some serious (amateur serious .. not Pro 16 layer board debugging serious), you'll run into issues (harware quality, software, ....).
Just my 2 cents.
Rodolphe

Out of interest, part way down this page is a logic analyser for the ST http://www.gossuin.be/index.php/shop.
I have now also acquired one of the cheap ones and hope to get to test it soon.

Appart from diagnosing new boards etc, would you say that an LA is of much use for fixing retro computers?

Logic Pro are great products, but IMHO they are quite overpriced unless you need two specific features. All the inputs are both digital and analog, and it works with USB 3.0 streaming. The latter means you can capture an enormous amount of data. If you don't need those features, there are much more affordable options, yet with similar quality and specs.

I use an HP1661CS. There is nothing as good for the money.

Just my 2 pence...

It’s not budget but if you are going past 2-3Mhz the DuPont wire probes are no use. They’re effectively 1:1 probes with all the documented issues you get with those.

The Old HPs can be picked up for 100-300 GBP. Each wire is a 1:100 probe... Well worth it. Plus they’re indestructible and have service manuals etc.

Recently I was trying to diagnose my... diagnostic cart with a Logic Analyzer (Logic-8 clone). I did it, but not in the way I'd like to. All lines were looking legit on the LA software, but I realized that, with probes connected, cart behaves differently. So I started disconnecting the probes, one by one and observing if this affects behavior of the cart. In this way I've found one pin which was causing troubles, which led me to finding a "cold" solder joint. After all I much prefer DSO over LA for diagnostics.

It all depends on what you'll be using the LA for. I have one of the cheap Chinese clones and it was a huge help trying to determine how to interface an Arduino to an old Texas Instruments TI-74 BASICALC. I only had to keep track of about 6 signals and the bitrate is quite low, so the device was definitely enough for that. I haven't hooked it up to anything faster, though :)

I have an 16 channel Chinese LA also and in some cases its quite effective but if its a higher freq signal and loading is a factor its usually ineffective or useless. Never the less it is helpful but I plan on upgrading to a HP analyzer at some point... most like when the Chinese LA lets me down.

I recently (3 weeks ago) picked up a second HP1661CS Scope for $50 + shipping (which was $70). I cant recommend them enough