Programmer Upgrade

    Today I received my new device programmer in the post; It's a TOP3100, it's primarily use is for programming my PIC and flash memory chips but hopefully I should be able to use it for other things. The serial JDM programmer I was using before this is very basic, and only works on older computers with a serial port.

I tested a few chips with it this afternoon and it's really nice and fast, one nice feature it has is that it will test pretty much all standard logic chips!!








(Update 20th Jan. 2014)    TopWin6 / TopWin7  Model TOP3100 problem programming the PIC18F2520 chips?

Recently I have tried the programmer with these chips and I get verify errors;  it clearly seems to have a problem with these.  Last night I ordered a PICKit 2 so when that arrives I can verify the chip tested are indeed ok.  The PICKit 2  isn't the latest PICKit, but it was cheaper than a PICKit 3.

(to be continued!)

Saitek Mephisto Exclusive Senator - Repair / Fix!

My older brother bought one of these rather nice chess computers a few years ago and it has seen a good number of games over the years; then recently it had developed a fault; the fault appeared intermittent at first but soon got to a point where it was unusable, so I offered to take a look at it.

After stripping it down and then some inspection I noticed that the ribbon cable had actually fractured, this was probably due to design fault by the original designers / manufacturers. I can only assume that after years of use of the pull-out tray stressed and wore out the ribbon cable.


After purchasing a new ribbon cable from Ebay and a lot of soldering later, it was back to it's old self, I also replaced the internal backup battery while I was at it.

Below are a few pics showing the repair and the inner workings of this top-end chess computer.