I believe that all of these 3 major analyzers will do class decoding to some extent.
I have used the mega-expensive Lecroy/CATC analyzers quite a bit. They are very full featured, and like you said, pretty intuitive (especially since their UI is pretty consistent across different technologies like Bluetooth, UWB, and USB). They have lots of different flexible triggering options, and do good protocol/timing validation. I haven’t tried any of these new less expensive models, so I can’t comment on those.
I have used different Ellisys products a bit as well. Their interface is different from the CATC one, which made it a bit less intuitive for me since that is what I was used to, but I was able to get everything I needed from them as well. One of the advantages to the Ellisys analyzers (although Lecroy may have added this feature) is that they have a real-time capture mode where you can watch as things are happening.
I have played with the Beagle a bit recently. My favorite feature of this analyzer is that it uses WinUSB (which I wrote)
Like the Ellisys, it does real-time captures. It is the smallest device, is quiet, and is USB bus powered, so it works great when I take my laptop somewhere else and need to analyze something. Their software is the least refined of the three. It took me a while to figure out what I needed to (really just get the descriptors). All of the raw data was there, but figuring out how to get the software to present it in a better format to some tinkering.
I think for most people any of these would give them the information that was needed, they may just present it differently.
-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of xxxxx@osr.com
Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2009 9:36 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: RE:[ntdev] USB Analyzer Recommendation
This field, I recently discovered, has changed a lot in just the last couple of years.
Back in September, I wrote a (long over due) article in The NT Insider in praise of the Ellisys, which I had just use to save my ass on yet another particularly annoying project: http://www.osronline.com/article.cfm?article=524 – When we bought it a few years back, the only other serious alternative was the CATC, which cost megabucks.
Given that the analyzers all collect the required data, your happiness with a given unit is likely to come down to (a) how much you like the user interface, and (b) what level of decoding the unit does for known packet types.
While I very much like the Ellisys display, I personally think the Lecroy/CATC style trace display is the most intuitive.
One thing that the Ellysis does is it decodes a number of common class packets (such as USB HUB class requests). I don’t know if the Lecroy does this.
I’d love to have somebody lend us one of each of these relatively new and inexpensive analyzers, and let The NT Insider do a shoot-out. Hmmm… maybe that’s something we can set Dan off on doing…
Peter
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