What an Amazing Tool - The Retro Chip Tester Pro - Minimal Montage Ed!

[@mk500]

Really nice soldering work there. Very clean build.

[@kingforaday8725]

My story is VERY similar to yours in that I received the board in early 2022 and have been ordering parts. I ordered about half of them in and along the way many times I ordered the wrong part or was sent the wrong part, a few I couldnt find, others I was confused on what to order!!! I finally gave up and just ordered a bag of the parts from an online seller. Yeah, that was more expensive but I do want to get this thing built in my lifetime! With work, honey-do's, emergencies, family things, etc. Im at the stage now of finding the time and energy to start building!

[@RavenWolfRetroTech]

Boy that does sound familiar 😎 I suggest you just commit to finishing step 1 in the guide. Its basically the resistors and diodes but entails about half the soldering

[@RudysRetroIntel]

Very cool! I still have one in a box, and I guess I should build it. Lol. Thanks for sharing

[@RavenWolfRetroTech]

I highly recommend it Rudy, I am still kicking myself for not prioritizing it higher.

[@RudysRetroIntel]

@@RavenWolfRetroTech I'm using the Chip Tester Pro from BackBit. It's small and very good

[@louiselynge2763]

Very nice job again. I looks like it helped a LOT by assembling the Chip Tester :-)

[@RavenWolfRetroTech]

Thanks Simon! It is way more useful than I expected!

[@deborahberi3249]

Great Video and very useful 'tool'. I use the BackBit and TL866 at times and cannot imagine going back to the old methods of testing. -Mark.

[@RavenWolfRetroTech]

I'm loving it Mark! I am intrigued by the Backbit tester by my budget is spent for the foreseeable future! Fortunately the RCTP can at least test PLAs!

[@alisterbh]

With the 'five button' version like you have, you can go back if you go past the chip you wanted by hitting 'Select'. Just built mine a few weeks ago and already used it a fair bit, Really cool piece of kit.

[@RavenWolfRetroTech]

Yeah I do like that feature plus it allows you to go backwards to an IC that you know is near the end of the menu. I just need to stop pressing the "Func Top" button when I want OK. 🙄😳

[@yesitreallyisme]

Amazing tool, wish we had it years ago. Now at least we#ll know what's good or bad.

[@RavenWolfRetroTech]

It is a much better tool than KZbins spam filter apparently. Sorry I didn't notice this was held for review for a week 😳

[@RacerX-]

Nice job. I built up mine a year or so ago and I feel your pain. haha. Especially the programming part as I struggled through that until I figured out how to do it right with a Pololu programmer referenced in the manual and altering the method shown in the manual. Anyway, it is a great chip tester and another I recommend is the BackBit Chip Tester Pro as it can also test most Amiga ICs too.

[@RavenWolfRetroTech]

Thanks Racer X! That BackBit tester sure does look interesting!

[@frankwolter850]

Hi, do you get the source code for the system if you buy it? (Asking because I would like to integrate a rotary encoder if possible)

[@RavenWolfRetroTech]

Frank, it is not an open source project so i don't think that the source is available. The designer explained to me that early design decisions from before the RCT pro expanded into its current state makes a rotary encoder very difficult to add because the ATmega interrupts are dedicated to I/O and polling is not reliable.

[@douro20]

There's an even better tester developed by Bob Grieb at Tauntek just for testing TTL logic chips. It goes well beyond normal logic testing, actually testing voltage thresholds to ensure they are within tolerances. Dr. Jean-Marc Verdiell aka CuriousMarc did a review of it on his channel.

[@RavenWolfRetroTech]

I will have to check that out. My main use case is ROM testing and RAM. The backbit tester is also interesting because it can test many of the Commodore specific ICs.

[@herbertschuster9088]

Have they increased the number of supported logic ICs yet? The RCT supports 1200 different logic ICs, not only the most common 74xx and 40xx ICs.

[@douro20]

@@herbertschuster9088 He's adding support for more logic chips with each firmware update. He'll add support for one on request if it's not supported.