Chip Tester Knows If Your Old Chips Are Working

October 23, 2021 by Al Williams 6 Comments

[Noel’s Retro Lab] has looked at retro chip testers before, but in a recent video you can see below he’s looking at the Chip Tester Pro, a preassembled chip tester for vintage chips, especially those used in Commodore computers. The device looks good on the surface with a form factor like a calculator or cell phone, an LCD display, and a 48 pin ZIF socket.

The user interface is pretty simple. A rotary encoder and a big red button are about it. However, there are also some headers where you have to use jumpers to wire signals to the chip. The firmware gives you specific directions, but it is reminiscent of programming old punchcard machines with jumper wires. Luckily, it looks like you only route the power to the device so you don’t have many wires to connect (usually two or three).

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3D Printable Scope Probe Adapts To Your Needs

October 21, 2021 by Dave Rowntree 18 Comments

If there’s one this we electronics engineers are precious about, it’s our test gear. The instruments themselves can be obscenely expensive, since all that R&D effort needs to be paid back over a much smaller user base compared to say a DVD player. The test probes themselves can often come with an eye-watering price tag as well. Take the oscilloscope probe, pretty much everyone who tinkers with hardware will be familiar with. It’s great for poking around, looking desperately for inspiration when you’re getting stuck in with some debug, but you’ve only got two hands, and that doesn’t leave any spare for button pushing.

Hands-free probing solutions exist, but they can be pricey, flimsy or just a pain to use. Sometimes you just want to solder a wire and leave the probe attached, hoping the grounding lead doesn’t fall off and short something. We’ve seen many solutions to this, so here’s yet another one you can 3D print yourself, so it’s almost free to make.

The two-part 3D printed assembly embeds a pair of wires with a Molex 0008500113 sprung terminal on one end, which can be terminated with your choice of pins, headers or just a pair of plain ‘ol wires. Once you’ve dropped your wiring of choice inside, simply glue the halves with a little cyanoacrylate and you’re good to go. Designed around the Siglent 200MHz PP215 specifically, it is likely compatible with many other brands. Thingiverse only has STL files (sigh!) so it may be tricky to adapt it to your exact probe dimensions, but the idea is good at least.

There is no shortage of electronics probing solutions out there, and boy have we covered a few over the years, here’s a low-cost current probe, an Open Source 2 GHz scope probe, and if you want to get really hacky, look no further for inspiration than the 2019 Hackaday SuperCon SMD Challenge.

Thanks [daniel] for the tip!

Building A Hammer Powered By Gunpowder

October 20, 2021 by Lewin Day 24 Comments

Hammers are pretty straightforward tools. If you need more impact force, just get a bigger hammer. Alternatively, you can look at enhancing performance with chemical means, and we don’t mean by using steroids. No, instead, you can try hammering with the aid of gunpowder, and [i did a thing] has done just that.

The build relies on using 6.8mm blank cartridges designed for the Ramset brand of explosive nail drivers. However, rather than buying such a tool off the shelf, [i did a thing] built one in a traditional hammer format instead. The device looks like a hammer, with a hinge on the two-piece head, which allows a blank cartridge to be placed inside. When the hammer is swung at a hard surface, the impact triggers the blank which drives the nail forward with incredible force.

[i did a thing] was able to pierce steel with the device, and sent a nail clean through a surfboard, too. It’s a very dangerous thing, so if you’re experimenting in this space, do be careful. Video after the break.

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The HP3458A: King Of Multimeters For Three Decades

October 18, 2021 by Al Williams 16 Comments

[Marco] looks at a lot of meters. However, he considers the HP3458A the best even though they were introduced more than 30 years earlier in 1989. Someone donated one to [Marco] but it presented some error messages on startup and exhibited erratic behavior, so he had some repairs to do.

The error codes hinted there were issues with the multislope analog to digital converter and that’s what sets the meter apart, according to [Marco]. The meter has 8.5 digits, so a normal conversion stage won’t cut it.

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Printable Caliper Jaws Increase Precision, Deflect Derision

October 18, 2021 by Dan Maloney 25 Comments

If you’ve watched as many machining videos as we have, no doubt you’ve seen someone commit the cardinal sin of metalworking: using caliper jaws to scratch a mark into metal. Even if it’s a cheap Harbor Freight caliper rather than an expensive Starrett or Mitutoyo tool being abused, derision and scorn predictably rain down upon the hapless sinner’s head.

The criticism is not without its merit, of course. Recognizing this, [Nelson Stoldt] came up with these clamp-on nosepieces designed to turn calipers into a better marking tool. Using stock calipers as marking gauges always introduces some error, since the jaws are equal lengths and thus have to be held at a slight angle to the workpiece in order to make a mark. The caliper jaws correct for this admittedly negligible error by extending one jaw, allowing it to ride on a reference face while the other jaw remains perpendicular to the workpiece. As a bonus, the short jaw has a slot to mount a steel marking knife, saving the caliper jaws from damage.

[Nelson] chose to 3D-print his caliper jaws, but they could just as easily be milled from solid stock to make them a little more durable. Then again, you could always 3D-print the calipers in the first place, and integrate these jaws right into them.

Vise Tripod Lets You Put The Tool Where You Need It

October 17, 2021 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

Vises are useful things for holding whatever you’re working on, but too often they’re stuck to a bench. [seamster] has experienced the glory of having a more portable solution, however, and has shared his design for a heavy duty vise tripod that provides just that.

The trick is that to be useful, the design must be heavy and stout enough to hold the vise without tipping over. For this build, [seamster] selected a fat steel pipe with 1/4″ thick walls, some solid bars and some 3/8″ thick plate. Legs and arms where then fabbed up from the bar material and welded up to form the tripod. A stout plate for the vise was then welded on top of the pipe, and the vise mounted pride of place on top.

It’s not a particularly difficult build, but it’s a smart idea that gets you a vise you can easily drag to where it’s needed. If you don’t have the vise itself, consider this hydraulic build. Meanwhile, if you’ve been whipping up your own useful workshop hacks, let us know!

Machining Wood Inlays, No CNC Required

October 17, 2021 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

It’s almost hard to remember a time when the obvious answer to most questions about manufacturing wasn’t “Throw it on the CNC.” CNC machines have become so entrenched that the acronym has become a verb; few people would misunderstand a statement like “Let’s just CNC that.”

But before CNC machines became so ubiquitous, there were plenty of clever tricks for cutting material in a controlled fashion, as [Pask] shows us with this tool to machine wood for inlays. The tool is called a parser (or passer) drill, and is designed for use in conjunction with a steel template. [Pask]’s version seems pretty easy to make; a pair of mild steel bars are forged flat into spade shapes before having a cutting surface ground into them. The two halves of the drill are welded together and ground down to fit in the chuck of a hand drill, a modern nod to the fact that few people will want to use the traditional bow and breastplate that drove the original parser drills.

In use, a steel template that determines the shape of the inlay is affixed to the workpiece. The cutting edges of the bits are plunged into the template cutout to machine out the wood; the overhangs of the bits act as depth stop and guide. It only takes a few seconds to make a neat, CNC-free inlay. The video below shows the tool being made and in action.

It’s nice to see what can be accomplished without the need for fancy CNC machines. Not that we have anything against them, of course, but when the same results can be had with some scraps of steel and a little ingenuity, it’s pretty impressive. Looking for something between manual tools and CNC for woodworking? The pantorouter might be just your speed.

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