RE: Its a Fluke...

> Firstly, how much do CPU pods cost?
>
I paid $200 for a 6502 pod. I know Al's run across one or two much
cheaper, but if you just need to order them someplace expect $200+. (I
think the place I bought from wanted $500 for it, but I just kept
bugging them and they eventually caved.) Fluke still sells them, but I
think they're close to $1K a pop now.

> Secondly, how much would Al K. pay for one ? :)
>
I'll let Al field that one. ;-)

> Thirdly (this might sound stupid), why do techies go ga-ga over these?
> I
> don't think its because it won first prize in the Atari 400 lookalike
> contest.
>
(In no particular order)

* It looks like an Atari 800. ;-) (Or 400 I suppose, guess it depends
on your recollection...)

* It's *REALLY* cool for snooping around something. You can examine I/O
in circuit using actual access speeds. You can hit that "learn" button,
type in an address range, and it'll build a memory map for you.

* You can "learn" a good board, write to profile to tape, plug in a bad
board, hit auto-test and it'll tell you where things are wrong.

* Test a bus for bit errors, test RAM, checksum ROM, write/read from
memory or IO locations.

* It's programmable! I used the thing almost exclusively to crack
Pacman Plus. Wrote a program that reads sequential memory addresses and
spits them to the serial port (if you have that option) when a laptop
captured them to build a ROM image.

* It'll do signature analysis.

* Did I mention everything happens at real access-speeds? Good for
finding problems that only occur at full speed and might elude a
chip-tester or something.

* You can get 6502, Z80, 6809, 8088, 68000, 8051, etc pods.

* Very handy for seeing how video memory or vector memory works. I used
it a LOT on the Sega multigame-- hand tweak vector memory to figure out
what did what while the results would just appear on the game monitor
(the vector generator had no idea that the data was coming from the
fluke and not the actual game code).

If you can't tell, they can pry mine from my cold, dead hands before I'd
give it up... ;-)

> I have a Fluke z80 CPU tshooter which looks like a dumbed down
> version of this. It can do memory & I/O operations from a local keypad
> or
> from an rs-232 port. I'm guessing the 9010 can do some mondo automated
> testing but I can't do much w/o the pods.
>
True. There's a language compiler that runs on the PC and can write
pretty complex test scripts for the 9010. The idea was if XYZ Company
had a board they did, someone would write a step by step test procedure
for it in the 9010 Language. The 9010 then prompts the technician where
to probe the board and follows down a decision tree to tell you exactly
where the error is. Cool idea, but take a while to write...

> Fourth, what does a CPU pod consist of?
>
They're fairly large-ish things, which have a ZIF socket in the top that
you plug a known-good CPU into. A ribbon cable then connects down to
the target board. As an FYI, if you get a pod you can test it simply by
plugging it into the Fluke and then plugging the ribbon cable back into
the ZIF socket on the pod (loopback). Turn the Fluke on and it'll
report the pod test status.

-Clay
Received on Tue Jul 21 10:45:14 1998