There’s a compact and affordable USB-based industrial digital interface adapter by Waveshare that lets you communicate with a variety of digital interfaces: UART, I²C, SPI (not Quad-SPI), and JTAG.

I’ve been using this multi-bus adapter for a while now. It’s proven reliable enough that I’ve recommended it to others, and I think it may as well deserve a spot in your toolkit as a genuinely useful utility device.

As a side note, compared to the Bus Pirate, it has a few quirks but behaves more predictably from my perspective, making it fun to use.

Over time, I’ll show you some of the ways I use it and share a few helpful code snippets.

Note: as you can see, this article is work in progress and will be extended gradually

Note: I am mainly an Arch Linux user and will share my perspective from that angle.
However, if you’re using Windows, you’re also in luck as the device’s Wiki page provides plenty of readily available information and setup guides for your platform.

Interfaces tested

Example parts to cover