Flukes For Sale (was RE: Its a Fluke...)

I was going to post this to RGVAC, but with all the discussion about
Flukes going on, I figured I'd give the vector list first dibs...

For Sale: Fluke 9005A Microprocessor Troubleshooter

Hopefully pods/probes will be forthcoming.

$185 (plus shipping)

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<snip>
> > 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 28 16:38:04 1998