Tom Nardi's Bus Pirate 5 SAO Is a Scaled-Down Homage to Ian Lesnet's Popular Debug Tool
Built to a 70% scale, this SAO might lack all the features of the real deal — but it's got eight working GPIO pins to play with.
Maker Tom Nardi has designed a badge add-on with a difference: it's a functional-ish scale replica of Ian Lesnet's Bus Pirate 5 — with working general-purpose input/output (GPIO) capabilities.
"When coming up with an idea for my 2024 badge Simple Add-On (SAO), I once again tried to think of hardware that had inspired me over the last 12 months," Nardi writes of the concept that inspired the badge accessory. "This year, that meant the Bus Pirate 5."
The Bus Pirate 5 is the latest in Ian Lesnet's family of multi-functional development, debugging, and reverse-engineering tools, now powered by a dual-core Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller. The new design includes an on-board color display and an array of RGB LEDs shining up through the translucent housing — while delivering all the functionality of earlier Bus Pirate models and more.
Nardi's homage doesn't quite deliver the same capabilities, but it's also not just for show. While the RGB LEDs under the casing are, indeed, just for visual effect and light up in random patterns, and the "screen" is just a silkscreen layer on the PCB, an on-board Microchip MCP23008 eight-bit input/output expander lets the user read or set the status of eight working GPIO pins — six on an edge connector, and two on the back.
"This Simple Add-On is dedicated to Ian [Lesnet] and the Bus Pirate team," Nardi writes, "for all the time and effort they've put into this legendary open source project."
Nardi has made the design available as a kit, with more information available on the project's Hackaday.io page.