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Black Mesa Labs has an ongoing mission to develop easy to use and fully capable open-source hardware and software tools that make engineering electronics easier. One such tool is this new low cost open-source logic analyzer called SUMP2 for people who otherwise work in the blind without an oscilloscope or logic analyzer on their bench top. BML’s 1st incarnation called SUMP1-RLE in 2014 was a 16bit FPGA based logic analyzer that performed real-time hardware compression and decompression. The decompressed data was streamed out over USB using the open SUMP protocol ( hence the name ), allowing it to be used with the excellent Java software from the original 2007 sump.org project. The SUMP1-RLE project was later enhanced from just 16 triggerable events to also include 2 DWORDs of “data” ( additional 64bits of non-triggering non-compressed signals ) and advanced triggering options. Including the data DWORDs made SUMP1 a useful tool for complex FPGA development debugging of internal FPGA event nodes and data paths. These new features required new custom software, written by BML in .NET for Windows. The software was functional, but graphically slow and was mostly used for trigger setup and then exporting captured data as VCD files into GTKwave for viewing.”

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