Reproduction Cinematronics CPU Exorciser

Just letting the community know that I have recently reproduced the Cinematronics CPU Exorciser circuitry.

I had 10 PCB's made and I've populated them all. I only need one to work with plus one or two spares so the extras I will likely try to sell after I haved worked with it long enough to be 100% sure that all is okay. If anybody is interested in one, email me.

See here: http://www.biltronix.com/cinexor.html

I tried for the past few years to just buy one on eBay or elsewhere but I never could find one. Well, truth be told, I found one (NIB) on eBay about 8 months ago but it went for over $400 so I passed on it. Boy, somebody was really desperate for one. Anyways, since then I've been collecting documentation on the device and after becoming familar enough with it, I decided to build my own version of it.

I got it hooked up and running this week and so far it is working great. I haven't fixed any of my several broken CCPU boards using it yet but I'm still learning my way around the CCPU board in general. It is obviously going to take some practice, however, I can see already that it probably won't be very long before I'm fixing my boards. .

If there is anyone out there who is truly interested in debugging CCPU boards, you'll want one of these. However, you also need a working HP5006A signature analyzer to go with the Exorciser. I got very lucky recently and bought one on eBay for $4.95. All it needed was a single small capacitor inside the probe and a new probe casing so I fixed it easily. These signature analyzers are getting harder and harder to find and they can be quite expensive but they do come up on eBay fairly regularly.

My ultimate goal with this project is to eventually develop a single-chip CPLD version of the Exorciser with the signature analyzer and a 4-digit display built into one small box. That way, one box would do it all and you wouldn't need the old HP5006A at all.

William Boucher

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Received on Tue Dec 23 13:07:30 2008