Logic analyser LA1010

Before completely giving up on the Arduino IDE, I got one of the Saleae clone logic analysers. These use an Altera Cyclone FPGA to capture up to 16 channels of digital inputs, then send the data to a Cypress FX2 microcontroller and thence over USB to your PC. From there, there's some rather powerful open source software for processing, displaying and decoding the data. Many different protocols are supported, not least Modbus of course.

Here's what you get on a scope. Very interesting - but you can't tell what is and isn't being sent over the bus. For instance, is it missing any critical bits? Does the CRC check agree. What are we looking at?

You can watch the bus using a tool like qModMaster or Hercules but they won't tell you much if the message is corrupted or missing.

This is where these cheap logic analaysers come in. Mine's from Kingst and 
https://qdkingst.com/en

Schematic (reverse engineered) https://sigrok.org/wimg/2/26/Kingst_LA2016_LA1016_Schematic.zip

What's inside:

And how it works is explained very comprehensively at the sigrok open source site.

This very handy and insightful video overview on the OpenTechLab channel was created by the originator of the sigrok project:

The software is free and very powerful:

But enough of the gadgets. It's time to pull on those Big Boy Pants and start using grown up coding tools.....