Basically a tool to interface with whatever IC you might have. Flexible input supporting many protocols, just hook it up to a random chip or serial debug pins on a board you are reverse-engineering and you can figure out the signal mapping and protocol decoding in software.
Piggybacking on that question, could I use this to interrogate a device over rs485 and reverse engineer the protocol it speaks? In particular, a pool heater and a variable speed pool pump
Yes, but you would still need to convert the differential signals to UART with appropriate voltage levels. A RS-485 to USB adapter might be the better option here.
But a buspirate has way more usability than just UART, it's awesome for some quick i2C or SPI experimentation
Ah, so Bus Pirate wouldn't help me trigger or decode the messages? My biggest problem is that I don't have the automation system which is expected to talk to the devices, so I'm at a loss as to how I'd even get communication started for me to look at what's going over the wire.
It can be used as a TTL serial adapter (ex getting a command line on common hardware/IoT devices), JTAG (debug, dump firmware), reading flash memory chips, etc
If you care for such things, you can use the Bus Pirate to see the speed of your code .. I have a macro I can wrap any function in, and by way of GPIO toggles, see on my bus pirate/logic analyzer, how many milliseconds/nanoseconds certain functions take to execute .. its also quite useful for getting a console - I have loaned my BP to a friend, who used it to reset his electric mopeds firmware ..
Basically a tool to interface with whatever IC you might have. Flexible input supporting many protocols, just hook it up to a random chip or serial debug pins on a board you are reverse-engineering and you can figure out the signal mapping and protocol decoding in software.