Hello Saleae team, I first want to say that your product is amazing and I’ve had my Logic Pro 16 since 2015. I’ve had no hardware issues with it besides using it so much that the blue LED has worn out and it can’t show purple or white anymore! Logic is an invaluable tool for my embedded development workflow. I mainly use it for debugging protocols like I2C, SPI, CAN, etc.
I’ve been using Logic 1 for several years, and switched over to Logic 2 last year. After getting some time with it, I have things I like and many things I really don’t like much.
There were a lot of convenient UI features in Logic 1 that are missing in Logic 2. Most of these aren’t a big problem or dealbreaker, but all together I feel it makes using Logic 2 slower and a little more frustrating of an experience than Logic 1.
- The live view is nowhere near live anymore. I set up the same capture in 2.4.14 and 1.2.29 (6 digital channels, 500MS/s, no analyzers, no signals changing, 30s capture). In Logic 1, as soon as the 30s capture ends, all the data is available to view. In Logic 2, it takes 30 additional seconds before all the data can be seen. Again, this is with no analyzers and not even any edges in the signals.
For me, this is especially egregious because one of the main ways I use Logic is to start a capture, wait for the event to happen (by watching the live display), then stop the capture. I can’t do this at all in Logic 2 because after only a few seconds of capture, the live view is already behind by seconds. I of course used Logic fine before this feature was added, but now that I’ve had it it’s so useful and I’m sad that it doesn’t work nearly as well anymore.
(Edit: This doesn’t seem to happen on 250MS/s, though it didn’t happen at all on Logic 1)
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There is no post-processing glitch filter. This is seriously crucial, IMO! Rarely will you know what kind of noise spikes will show up in the capture, and spurious edges will wreck most analyzers. You either need to know beforehand what frequency of signals you’re expecting to see and set the glitch filter accordingly (hoping you don’t set it too high and filter signals of interest) or keep re-capturing while adjusting the filter until you get it right. For rare events you don’t have that luxury. Being able to capture, see that there’s noise, measure the noise, and set the filter accordingly is huge. I’ve seen the threads on why it’s difficult to add to Logic 2; I think it needs to be a priority.
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The right panel only shows one thing at a time (analyzers, measurements, timing markers). There’s so much unused vertical space, I would need literally dozens of measurements or timing markers to fill the screen. Why not show more stuff? Logic 1 had annotations, analyzers, and decoded protocols all visible at once, and if you didn’t need one, you could just minimize it.
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The scroll zoom is really slow now, if I’m zoomed in to a waveform and need to zoom out a bit to navigate to a different part, it just takes way too many scrolls. Logic 1 I’d say bordered on too sensitive, but I find Logic 2’s scrolling so insensitive that it’s a chore to use it. I feel like I’m better off just hitting PgDown to zoom all the way out and using drag-to-zoom to get back where I need. There’s gotta be a middle ground, or better yet, a sensitivity slider in the settings menu.
These are really minor gripes but still stuff I miss or just find kinda annoying:
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In Logic 1 you could select/deselect digital/analog channels by holding left-click on one and dragging the cursor. It was very quick to change channel configurations; now you have to individually click every channel.
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In Logic 1, I really liked placing timing markers with one key press, and being able to delete any of them with two key presses (hit 1 to place marker 1, then ESC to cancel it). Having 10 markers available with a single key press was great. Again, this is pretty minor because Ctrl+Shift+T or Ctrl+T isn’t much harder. Removing them is slow, though (see next point)
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When I click a timing marker, I can hit ESC to close its window, but can’t hit DEL to remove it. If I click a measurement it’s the opposite, ESC does nothing but DEL does delete it. Can’t ESC and DEL work on both?
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When adding an analyzer, I could hit enter in Logic 1 to save and close the window, but not in Logic 2.
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When I drag-to-zoom on a small blip of activity, I sometimes have to do it multiple times to zoom in enough, depending on how big my selection box is (smaller box, bigger zoom). But it would be nice if it would just zoom all the way in until the selected signal activity fills the screen.
That is a lot of complaining! Here’s what I do like a lot about Logic 2:
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The new timing markers are great, I love seeing the time delta and frequency right at the marker pair while placing it. Getting a quick measurement like this is mainly what I use the markers for.
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Placing timing markers by clicking the timeline at the top is convenient.
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I really like the new navigational keyboard shortcuts added. The drag-to-zoom feature and PgDown to zoom all the way out are excellent, they’ve replaced almost all my scrolling (partly by necessity, see above, but they are really good)
These aren’t complaints, but some things I’ve found in Logic 2 that I think are bugs or unintended behavior:
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When placing a timing marker pair, I can’t navigate the capture with the mouse (trying to drag the screen just results in placing the marker). WASD works, but if you want to use the mouse to pan right, you have to repeatedly scroll out on the left side of the screen and scroll in on the right.
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Alt-tabbing into Logic brings up the “Drag to zoom” cursor and text box, but it’s not in drag-to-zoom mode. Hitting alt makes it return to normal.
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W and S zoom about the middle of the screen rather than where the cursor is, which may be intended. To me it feels really weird. Scrolling zooms at the cursor as expected.
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When snapping a timing marker to a signal edge, the marker can sometimes shift 1 pixel left/right depending on the zoom level (both when the marker has been placed and not yet placed)
Overall, I think I will be sticking with Logic 1 for most captures and Logic 2 for analyzers that aren’t available in Logic 1. Honestly, the only real problems with Logic 2 that keep it from working well for me are the live view not updating in real time and no post-processing filtering. Everything else is just a UX inconvenience for me. It just feels harder to use fluidly.
I know big complaint posts like this are super negative especially because nobody comes by just to say you’re doing a great job and they love the product. I want to stress that I absolutely love my Logic and it’s an invaluable tool for me. I recommend it to every embedded engineer I know! It’s given me so much value over the years and I cherish mine. I just feel the new version of the software has regressed in some areas compared to the first. Thankfully, I can leave both versions installed and just use either as needed.