(This is a guest post by tmbinc. You can read the original post here on debugmo.de.)

Fail.

That’s probably the first word you think of when hearing the word “OpenVizsla”. It all started good in - WTF - 2010 when bushing and pytey thought it would be a good idea to build an open-source USB sniffer.

Scam. That’s what people called the project after unable to provide a working prototype after one year, two years, three years. But let me assure you: this project is not a scam. We just failed. A lot.

I don’t want to swirl up the past - that was done before, but rather present the current state of affairs. TL;DR: It looks good, and OV3 actually a working USB analyzer these days, and it shipped to (almost) all of the original backers. Once all of them shipped, more of them will be sold to the public.

Let’s start with a hardware overview of ov3, the third attempt to get it right. By the way, you can find everything in the openvizsla github repository. Just in case you want to build your own USB analyzer.