Active Firmware Tools is one person.
The hardware design, the FPGA, the firmware, the desktop application on Windows, macOS, and Linux, the trace file format, the documentation, the website you're reading right now. All of it. My name is Tim Harvey. I'm in Temecula, California, and I build the Active-Pro family of firmware debuggers and logic analyzers.
What that actually means
Shipping a tool like the Active-Pro Ultra is not one job. It's about a dozen.
There's the PCB, currently on revision 7.3, with its own BOM and supply chain to manage. There's the Verilog RTL running on a Lattice CrossLink-NX FPGA, including the streaming state machine that moves capture data off the device at full rate, the FWFT FIFO design, and an ADC calibration pipeline. There's a JTAG and eFuse programming flow built around Lattice Radiant, automated end to end. There's the firmware. There's a Qt 6 desktop application that has to look right and behave the same on three operating systems, including a Mac universal binary for Apple Silicon and an AppImage on Linux with proper libusb and udev integration. There's a custom file format, the Active Firmware Trace (.aft), with a published specification. There's an MCP server exposing forty plus automation tools over TCP so AI assistants can drive the instrument directly. There's the manual, the website, the YouTube channel, and the support inbox.
The Active-Pro is designed and tested in Temecula, California, and manufactured in San Marcos, California. No offshore assembly, no contract houses on the other side of the world. The hardware you put on your bench was built within driving distance of the engineer who designed it.
One person did that. I'm not telling you this to impress you. I'm telling you because when you buy an instrument, you should know exactly what's behind it.
Forty years of doing this. The Active-Pro is the result.
I've been designing embedded systems and firmware since 1983. Over forty years. I've used every generation of debugging tool that's existed in that time, from the early ICE units through modern logic analyzers, scopes, and JTAG debuggers. The Active-Pro is the culmination of what I learned a firmware engineer actually needs on the bench, built by someone who has been at that bench since before most of today's engineers were born.
In 2002 I founded USBee Test Pods and shipped tens of thousands of units to engineers over the next twenty years. That gave me a firsthand education in what makes a piece of test equipment good, what makes one bad, what manufacturing at scale actually requires, and what users genuinely need versus what they say they need. The Active-Pro is built on every lesson from that run.
Today I'm a Principal Embedded Systems Engineer at WebSec Corporation, working on hardware that has to survive being deployed by defense customers in places I can't talk about. I build IFF transponders and key loaders, working with CHSI, RGMII, DS-101, and custom protocols running across multiple processors at the same time. Everything has to run at full speed, because in this kind of system a breakpoint doesn't pause the bug, it changes the bug.
The Active-Pro exists because I needed it for that work and nothing on the market did what I needed. So I built it.
Our team uses AI extensively in our day-to-day engineering work, so the Active-Pro was built to support that workflow at every level. Hand a capture to an AI and ask questions about it. Point an AI agent at the live instrument and let it drive the debug session. Run it fully autonomous in a loop. The .aft format, the MCP server, and the forty plus automation tools over TCP are all there because that's how engineers actually work now, including the ones building it.
Five years later, every engineer at WebSec uses it daily. So do firmware teams at companies around the world. It pulls details out of a running design that no single instrument can get to.
That's not a marketing claim. That's the reason it earned its place on my bench before it earned a place on anyone else's.
The best firmware debugger I know how to build. And I've been building them for a long time.
The Active-Pro was already winning in a serious engineering environment before it was ever for sale. Engineers at WebSec rely on it daily to ship hardware that has to work the first time, every time, in the field. It earned that place by being better at one specific job than any other tool on the market: showing a working firmware engineer exactly what their system is doing, in real time, at full speed, without getting in the way.
That's what you get when you put one on your bench.
A debugger that keeps up with your hardware. Full-speed capture across multiple processors at once, with the kind of trigger system that finds the moment a bug actually happened instead of the moment after.
A tool that gets sharper every release. I use the Active-Pro every day. Every time I hit a wall on a real project, the right answer is to make the tool better. You benefit from every one of those improvements.
An instrument designed to work the way you work. Including with AI in the loop, from quick chat-with-a-capture sessions to full agent-driven debugging. Not because it's a buzzword, but because that's how modern firmware work actually gets done.
One engineer, four decades of experience, building the tool he wished had existed the whole time. That's what's on the other end of the order page.
Five things I can promise you, because I'm the one promising them.
You already know the routine.
A scope on one signal. A logic analyzer on another. A JTAG debugger that halts the processor the second things get interesting and takes the bug with it. Three instruments, three cable looms, three different ways of looking at time, and you're the one in the middle trying to correlate them by hand while the bug laughs at you.
Those tools were designed for different jobs in different decades. You've been stitching them together because nothing else existed.
So I built one.
The Active-Pro does, in one instrument, what those three were never built to do together. Full-speed capture across multiple processors at once. Triggers that find the moment the bug actually happens, not the moment after. A trace file you can hand to an AI and get real answers from. No halting. No guessing. No swapping cables between three boxes hoping the bug shows up the same way twice.
It works. It works on cryptographic hardware. It works on multi-processor protocol bring-up where the timing is the whole game. It works on the kind of bugs that used to eat a week of your life and now take an afternoon. The engineers using it every day stopped reaching for the old tools because they didn't need them anymore.
I built this for me. It turned out everyone else needed it too.