Electronics are not my jam to a level beyond pure hackery, but I've seen enough youtubers with RIGOL scopes with no more hacking than soldering a single shunt to know that you can get very powerful capabilities - including protocol debugging - for less than... well, considerably less than price of a flight to YYC for the weekend.
Its Advent of Code season again.
https://adventofcode.com/2023 Hopefully no need for sparse arrays and I can get through it this year.