La104 Firmware Work Jun 2026

The LA104 was born in a quiet workshop above a bicycle repair shop, where solder smoke mixed with the scent of oil and old paper. It was small — barely larger than a coin — but packed with curiosity: a tiny screen, a few buttons, and a heart of code called firmware.

The original firmware limited capture depth to 4K samples per channel. By tweaking the SDRAM initialization (the LA104 has an external 8MB SDRAM), I reallocated a larger ring buffer. Suddenly, I could capture 64K samples at 100MHz. The trade-off? UI responsiveness dropped while the buffer filled—but that’s a problem for future me. la104 firmware work

| Feature | Stock | Optimized Custom | Limit | |---------|-------|------------------|-------| | Sample rate | 100Msps | 100Msps (hard limit due to comparator) | 120Msps (unstable) | | Buffer depth | 8KB (approx 6.5k samples) | 8KB + RLE (effectively infinite for idle buses) | RAM constraint | | Decoder speed | 1Mbit/sec UART | 4Mbit/sec UART (optimized C) | CPU bound | | USB transfer | 1.1 Full-speed | 1.1 Full-speed (no HS on PIC32MX) | 12Mbps | The LA104 was born in a quiet workshop

Let’s walk through a real-world project: adding an I2C EEPROM programmer mode. By tweaking the SDRAM initialization (the LA104 has