A lot of my pic work has to do with serial protocols of one sort or 
another - Mostly async serial, but some SPI and/or I2C.  Expect to end 
up with some 1-wire in the future, but that isn't really important.

As anyone who does this type of work knows, it is really nice to be able 
to peek at the communication on the bus.  For this purpose, I've been 
using a saleae logic analyzer, but I'm sort of getting irritated with 
the 'capture, then analyze' step.  It works really good when I need the 
logic analyzer features (aka, see pin change, then see serial data come 
out).  Not so good when all I really care about are what bytes are being 
put on the bus.  I also like the fact that it processes the data on a 
bit basis, and doesn't rely on a hardware uart or serial port to 
visualize the data.   In fact, the only real problem is the lack of 
realtime viewing of the data.

So, what I'm looking for is to find some sort of logic and/or serial 
analyzer which will allow me to see SPI and/or I2C data, full duplex, in 
real time..  without the capture, analysis process.

I did look at the Microchip PICKit2 and PicKit Serial analyzer, but they 
appear to be half duplex, and are oriented toward basically being a 
monitorable serial port for the PC.  If this is wrong, let me know.

The others I've looked at are generally either a USB to serial port chip 
(or two), or are a logic analyzer very similar to the selae (capture, 
then stop and display).

I guess I should include budget....  But I'm not really all that cost 
sensitive, but don't want to spend thousands (or perhaps even hundreds) 
on such a device.   Of course, if it's $1K and the last device of this 
type I'll ever buy, I'm all over it :)

Ideas?

-forrest
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