Collaborate Disseminate
As cheap microcontrollers have given us an impressive range of test equipment trinkets to play with, it’s easy to forget some of the old standabys. A curve tracer for example, …read more Continue reading Don’t Forget Your Curve Tracer
Occasionally, we find fun new electronic instruments in the wild and can’t resist sharing them with our readers. The item in question is the FNIRSI HRM-10 Internal resistance meter, which …read more Continue reading The FNIRSI HRM-10 Internal Resistance Meter
If you’re testing old stereo equipment, a dim bulb tester can really come in handy. It’s not for testing bulbs, though, it’s a tester that uses a dim bulb to test …read more Continue reading A Dim Bulb Tester Is For Testing Other Equipment, Not Bulbs
[mircemk] built a slick-looking LED tester with a couple handy functions built in. Not only can one select a target current to put through an LED, but by providing a …read more Continue reading LED Tester Also Calculates Resistor For Target Voltage
When USB first came on the scene, one of the benefits was that essentially any four conductors could get you to the point where you could send information at 12 …read more Continue reading JITX Spits Out Handy USB Cable Tester
Plugging in something like an antique radio to see if it works is a good way to have a bad time, because some old components don’t age well. For vintage …read more Continue reading Power Up Vintage Electronics Less Unsafely With a Dim-Bulb Tester
Some of the most popular vintage computers are now more than forty years old, and their memory just ain’t how it used to be. Identifying bad memory chips can quickly …read more Continue reading Simple DRAM Tester Built With Spare Parts
[Dilshan] built a dedicated I2C tester which allows for I2C bus control over USB using simple commands such as init, read, write, etc. The Linux kernel has had I2C driver …read more Continue reading DIY I2C Tester
Collecting old CPUs and firing them up again is all the rage these days, but how do you know if they will work? For many of these ICs, which ceased production decades ago, sorting the good stuff from the defective and counterfeit is a minefield.
Testing old chips is a challenge in itself. Even if you can find the right motherboard, the slim chances of escaping the effect of time on the components (in particular, capacitor and EEPROM degradation) make a reliable test setup hard to come by.
Enter [Samuel], and the Universal Chip Analyzer (UCA). Using an FPGA to …read more
Continue reading Universal Chip Analyzer: Test Old CPUs In Seconds
There’s an inside joke among cyclists – the number of bikes you need is “n+1”, where “n” is your current number of bikes. The same probably also applies to the number of tools and equipment a hacker needs on their workbench. Enough is never enough. Although [David Johnson-Davies] has a couple of multimeters lying around, he still felt the urge to build a stand-alone continuity tester and has posted details for a super-simple ATtiny85 based Continuity Tester on his blog. For a device this simple, he set himself some tall design goals. Using the ATtiny85 and a few SMD discretes, …read more
Continue reading Continuity Tester uses the ATtiny85’s Comparator