Despite what this module says on the case, it’s certainly not official Saleae Logic Analyzer hardware. [Jack Andrews] picked up this Chinese knockoff on eBay for about $18. When plugged into the computer the Saleae software picks it up as the official hardware. But [Jack] has seen other knockoffs which have a jumper to select between Saleae cloning and USBee cloning so he found a way to switch software with this dongle.
He pulled the board out of the case and discovered a Cypress CY7C68013A microcontroller on a poorly-soldered board (imagine that). This is an 8051-compatible processor that includes USB functionality. There’s also an EEPROM on the bottom of the board which stores the VID/PID pair identifying it as Saleae Logic hardware. The trick to getting this working with the USBee software is to change that pair. [Jack] managed to do this without an external programmer. He uninstalled the Saleae driver and installed a Cypress driver. Then he wrote a bit of code for the CY7C68013A to rewrite the EEPROM and flashed it via the USB connection. Now the dongle enumerates as USBee Logic Analyzer hardware.

Filed under: tool hacks