Disassembly of a 17 Yuan Logic Analyzer: Is the Cypress Chip More Expensive than the Whole Unit?

I saw this very cheap logic analyzer for sale a long time ago,17 yuan, and it even comes with a USB cable and Dupont wires. Out of curiosity about how it was made, I bought a set to disassemble.

10 pin headers, with a total of 8 channels, plus one CLK and GND signal. It is marked as 24MHz, if this data is not exaggerated, it can only measure UART and I2C, and for higher speed SPI it is powerless.

The signal interface uses this type of horn socket, which contains 2x5P 2.54 pitch pin headers.

USB port is still the ancient MINI USB port. However, I must say that this connector is sturdier than Micro USB connectors.

Upon disassembling to examine the circuit board, the chip used is the Cypress CY7C68013A-56LTXC, which is a 51 core microcontroller with a high-speed USB controller, with a maximum clock frequency of 48MHz.

Interestingly, the price of this chip on the Lichuang Mall is 27+.

On Taobao, there are two price ranges, one similar to Lichuang’s and another priced at 10-15.

There is a 24C08 on the board, used to store some configurations. I2C communication pull-up resistor 2.2K.

From this perspective, 8 input channel signals come in, passing through a series of 100 ohm resistors before entering the CY7C68013A chip, while a 100K pull-up resistor is also added at this node.

Mini USB connector close-up.

Upon careful observation of the soldering of this main control chip, I found that the bottom and PCB are not tightly bonded, QFN pins should have solder wicking, but in reality, it did not wick well. The SMT process for other chips looks quite good.

Interestingly, when I found the upper computer download link from the product detail page and intended to download the software, I discovered that the download link redirected to some messy and even illegal websites. I decided not to try it, after all, 24M would not be very meaningful even if it could work, but for beginners, measuring some IO actions, UART, I2C, and other simple communications should still be somewhat useful, and the biggest advantage is that it is cheap, reducing the learning cost!