Harmful Prototypes’ Ian Lesnet has give you a technique to get the Bus Pirate 5XL and Bus Pirate 6, beforehand placed on maintain on account of a {hardware} flaw in Raspberry Pi’s new RP2350 microcontroller, again up and operating: add a few resistor arrays.
“Repair Your Six! The brand new RP2350-based Bus Pirates want an additional exterior pull-down resistor to repair silicon bug E9,” Lesnet explains. “We have to substitute the pull-down resistors on the RP2350 pins that management the Bus Pirate IO pins: RN302, RN307. We want two substitute resistors: 4.7k resistor array (4.7k-8k ought to all work), 4×0402 package deal (additionally known as 0804 or 2010M). Convex sort (pads on the tip of the leads, not between the leads).”
The RP2350-E9-hit Bus Pirate 6 (pictured) and 5XL may be fastened with the addition of two resistor packs (circled), Ian Lesnet has introduced. (📷: Harmful Prototypes)
The “silicon bug E9” to which Lesnet refers is erratum RP2350-E9, a {hardware} flaw in Raspberry Pi’s recently-launched quad-core dual-architecture RP2350 microcontroller triggered, the corporate says, by IP acquired from an out of doors vendor and included within the chip’s design. It displays as an issue when utilizing general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) pins as an enter, inflicting them to “latch” at round 2.15V — one thing the corporate had beforehand mentioned solely occurred whereas utilizing the chip’s inside pull-down resistors, however later admitted could possibly be triggered even with out these lively.
The flaw was sufficient for Lesnet and others to pause or outright cancel deliberate RP2350 initiatives pending revised silicon or at the very least extra readability on the difficulty, with Lesnet warning that RP2350-based Bus Pirate 5XL and Bus Pirate 6 {hardware} — designed as RP2350-powered successors to the RP2040-driven Bus Pirate 5 debugging software — shipped earlier than the issue was found “are in all probability DOA [Dead On Arrival].”
The prevailing resistor packs do not must be faraway from the board; the brand new ones can merely be soldered on prime. (📷: Harmful Prototypes)
For many who had picked up a “DOA” Bus Pirate 5XL or Bus Pirate 6, then, Lesnet’s discovery of a workaround for the flaw might be welcomed: the soldering of two resistors, which act as an exterior pull-down sturdy sufficient to resolve the latching conduct and have the GPIO pins work as anticipated. Higher nonetheless, it is a comparatively simple repair: “As an alternative of eradicating the present 100k pull-downs,” Lesnet explains, “we are able to solder the brand new resistor array on prime.”
Full particulars on the repair can be found in Lesnet’s Mastodon thread; those that have a Bus Pirate 5XL or Bus Pirate 6 and who carry out the modification can ship Lesnet an image of the repair to obtain an unique “I Mounted My Six” sticker.