Don’t Put That EPROM In Your Mouth!

[Jeremy] had some chips on hand that included EPROM.  We’re not talking about EEPROM, we mean EPROM that need a UV light source to erase. Most people don’t want to drop a few hundred dollars on a dedicated EPROM eraser, there must be another way.

Boy, EPROM really suck. But so do pacifiers and he already had a solution for exposing those to UV. He pulled out his $30 UV pacifier cleaner and tossed the chip inside. Two times through the cleaning cycle and the data was gone. We’ve looked into using UV LEDs to do the job but some experimentation shows that it doesn’t work. These pacifier cleaners are cheap and easy to get a hold of. The real question is are you still using chips that require UV for erasing?

60 thoughts on “Don’t Put That EPROM In Your Mouth!

  1. I still use UV eraseable PICs, because i got them very cheap. I develop my program on a Flash-based PIC, adapt it in a few mins and then put the UV-erasable PIC into the device where it stays for the rest of its life.

  2. These posts about lead poisoning from an IC or from touching electronic parts = LOAD of CRAP.

    Live in a house built before the 1990s? Just FYI you water pipes are soldered with lead base solder. Not to mention all the scarrrry lead based paint left on surfaces. QUICK KIDS TO THE LEAD FREE CLEAN ROOM DON”T DRINK THE COOL-AID!

    C’mon guys you would have to like eat and oz of solder a day for 6 months to get sick.

  3. OK, enough of the sniping. The video issue seems to be resolved in the newest batch week 38. Just look at the serial number on the back of the box, and if it has any variation of 9C738******, you should be good to go. Some serial numbers have a different number and alpha combo prior to the “38, so just look for that instead.

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