If you happen to’re into classic Macs and spend time repairing them, you recognize that they have a tendency to have capacitors which leak and trigger injury to the PCB. Generally the injury is straightforward to seek out and restore, however different instances it may be tedious, onerous work. Properly, this collection of BlinkHATs for the varied PLCC chips in classic Macs may help you rapidly spot indicators which are both not related or caught in a specific state! From the primary CPU – the Motorola 68000 – all the best way to the extra obscure chips just like the Apple ASC or SWIM chips, there’s a BlinkHAT for all of the essential elements, with 8 totally different chips lined to this point.
The LEDs are color coded for his or her explicit operate – inexperienced for system bus indicators, blue for management indicators or indicators devoted to that specific chip, and purple for voltage pins. This may rapidly assist spot essential pins which will have cracked/damaged solder joints or socket pins. It may possibly additionally show you how to see whether or not the system is caught in reset, lacking a voltage rail, or if there’s any bus exercise in any respect!
When you’ve got watched movies of individuals repairing these motherboards, you’ll be able to rapidly see how a easy software like this may very well be very helpful for quick evaluation of chip connections, earlier than pulling out the oscilloscope or different extra superior debugging instruments. As soon as a motherboard has been recapped and cleaned, a power-on take a look at with these BlinkHATs might rapidly offer you a common concept of the system state. Test them out should you’re into Macintosh computer systems!
