Boot log capture only needs three wires and a $3 cable. The adapters below justify higher prices by doing more than UART: SPI flash dumps, JTAG / SWD, RF, portable field work. Short comparison with specs, pros and cons, and recommendations by use case.
| Tigard | Flipper Zero | Bus Pirate 5 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Approx. price | ~$60 (Crowd Supply) | $169 | ~$45 to $80 |
| Core silicon | FT2232H | STM32WB55 (Cortex-M4) | RP2350 |
| Protocols | UART, SPI, I2C, JTAG, SWD, AVR ISP | UART, SPI, I2C, GPIO, plus Sub-GHz / NFC / RFID / IR / BLE | UART, SPI, I2C, 1-Wire, HD44780, JTAG (basic) |
| I/O voltage | 1.8 / 3.3 / 5 V switchable | 3.3 V | 1.65 to 5 V |
| Standalone | No, needs host | Yes, screen + battery | Yes, screen + USB-C |
| Open hardware | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Pick when | Bench work, full multi-protocol | Field work, one all-in-one tool | Interactive chip exploration, scripting |
Note: for first-probe TX hunting with a multimeter, use a disposable $3 CH340 instead of any of the above. See the sacrifice probe section.
Tigard
Tigard
~$60 USDFT2232H-based open-hardware multi-protocol board. Project lead is Joe FitzPatrick (@securelyfitz on GitHub, top contributor on the upstream tigard-tools/tigard repo). Design lineage acknowledged in the README is Matir's TIMEP.
- FT2232H is first-class in OpenOCD, flashrom, pyftdi, libftdi.
- Switchable 1.8 V / 3.3 V / 5 V I/O. Catches the inevitable 1.8 V vs 3.3 V mistake.
- Dedicated header per protocol. No jumper juggling between modes.
- Open hardware with an active upstream.
- Needs a host computer. Does nothing standalone.
- Not portable. Pure bench tool.
- Crowd Supply stock is intermittent.
Flipper Zero
Flipper Zero
$169 USDSelf-contained portable hardware tool. STM32WB55, screen, battery, sub-GHz radio, NFC, RFID, IR, Bluetooth, plus an 18-pin GPIO header that exposes UART, SPI, I2C, and general GPIO. Official docs at docs.flipper.net/gpio-and-modules.
- One device, every wireless and serial interface typically needed on site.
- Screen shows the boot log in real time. No host required.
- Battery powered. Genuine pocketable form factor.
- Open firmware with an active community and third-party apps.
- JTAG / SWD via expansion modules. Fiddlier than Tigard.
- Logic-analyzer functionality is nominal.
- $169, the most expensive of the three.
- Mainstream brand recognition (TikTok hype) sometimes hurts adoption in pro settings.
Bus Pirate 5 / 5XL / 6
Bus Pirate 5 / 5XL / 6
~$45 to $80 USDOriginally shipped by Ian Lesnet at Dangerous Prototypes in 2008 (Wikipedia). Stayed mostly static for years. Current generation is the RP2350-based Bus Pirate 5 / 5XL / 6 with a screen, USB-C, and actively-maintained firmware. Mainline revision as of mid-2026 is REV10.
- Scriptable interactive console. Fast for one-off poking.
- Modern RP2350 silicon. Big jump from the long-stagnant prior generations.
- Wide voltage range (1.65 to 5 V).
- Cheapest of the three.
- Outside the FT2232H ecosystem. OpenOCD with vendor JTAG configs and flashrom won't target it natively.
- JTAG support is functional, not first-class.
- Older Bus Pirate tutorials online often don't apply to the v5/v6 firmware.
Sacrifice probe: the $3 CH340
Use one cheap CH340 cable for the first probe on an unknown board. When hunting for TX with a multimeter, the touched pad may sit above 3.3 V or spike transiently under load. A 3.3 V CH340's RX input clamp will fry before reaction time. The cheap cable is the intended sacrifice. The Tigard goes on only after the pad is confirmed RX-safe at the expected voltage.
Buying guide
| If | Buy |
|---|---|
| Only buying one tool | Tigard. Most capability per dollar for any work that goes past pure UART. |
| Traveling with tools | Flipper Zero. Worth the premium for the self-contained form factor alone. |
| Scripting and exploring chips often | Bus Pirate 5. Interactive console workflow is genuinely faster than scripting against libftdi. |
| What to skip | Counterfeit FTDI cables. FTDI's drivers periodically inject "NON GENUINE DEVICE FOUND" into the byte stream on clones, which corrupts boot logs in ways that waste hours. |
Related
- Device Fingerprinter: paste a captured boot log, get bootloader / kernel / SoC identification immediately.
- Device coverage: what BootIntel detects per device family.