When someone talking about the Bus Pirate, will you get excited and wishing to involve yourself in the development project? If you did, then today you’ve came to the right place!

The bus pirate is a universal bus interface that talks to most chips from a PC serial terminal. The several standard serial protocols are supported at 3.3-5 volts, which including I2C, SPI and asynchronous serial. The additional ‘raw’ 2- and 3- wire libraries can interface almost any proprietary serial protocols.

If you refer to the above figure, you can see that the bus pirate is a serial terminal bridge to multiple IC interface protocols. Therefore, you can type commands into a serial terminal on the computer. The commands go to the bus pirate through the PC serial port. The bus pirate talks to a microchip in the proper protocol and it will return the results to the PC in seconds!

In addition, all pins output is on 3.3 volts, but are 5 volt tolerant. The on-board 3.3 volt and 5 volt power supplies are available to supply the power to the connected chip. The serial terminal interface can work with any types of system, such as PC, Mac, Linux, Palm pilots, Wince device and much more.