6 Jan
2006
6 Jan
'06
7:35 p.m.
On 1/7/06, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
2) A logic probe. HP have made some nice ones over the
years (I've seen
them on E-overpay from time to time). Actually, a cheap one (Radio Shack
used to sell them) is all you need for most work. This is very useful for
fioding a signal that's stuck high, or something like that. If you are a
rich enthusiast, consider attempting to find an HP 'Advanced Logic Probe'
aka LogicDart. It's a handheld thing that acts as a digital voltmeter,
frequency meter, logic probe and 3-channel logic analyser. A word of
warning, if you ever use one of these you will be 'hooked'....
One of my buddies has one of these - it's verrrry nice. I'll have to
start looking for one.
5) An EPROM Emulator. I put this under test equipment
because it's very
useful to replace the ROMs in a system with an emulator containing a
little test program (even something as simple as a jump to itself), and
see what happens. I built my own, they are not complicated.
I have a couple of these... I can't recommend them highly enough. I
first used one to develop firmware for a VAXBI communications board -
in the old days, we'd try out a firmware release, see it fail, power
down the VAX (15 min), pull the board, change the firmware, burn new
EPROMs, reboot the VAX, try again... we were lucky to get 4 cycles per
day. Insert an EPROM emulator and suddenly we saved the entire
power-off cycle and burn time. I even threw in the command to reload
the emulator at the end of the makefile and with literally an "EDIT"
plus a "MAKE" (for VMS), things were ready to try again in under a
minute.
If you do firmware development, get one of these tools. I have a
PROMice and a ROMulator. Very handy.
-ethan