If you’re into vintage Macs and spend time repairing them, you know that they tend to have capacitors which leak and cause damage to the PCB.Sometimes the damage is easy to find and repair, but other times it can be tedious, hard work.Well, this series of BlinkHATs for the various PLCC chips in vintage Macs can help you quickly spot signals that are either not connected or stuck in a particular state! From the main CPU – the Motorola 68000 – all the way to the more obscure chips like the Apple ASC or SWIM chips, there’s a BlinkHAT for all the important parts, with 8 different chips covered so far.
The LEDs are colour coded for their particular function – green for system bus signals, blue for control signals or signals dedicated to that particular chip, and red for voltage pins.This can quickly help spot important pins that may have cracked/broken solder joints or socket pins.It can also help you see whether the system is stuck in reset, missing a voltage rail, or if there’s any bus activity at all! If you have watched videos of people repairing these motherboards, you can quickly see how a simple tool like this could be very useful for fast analysis of chip connections, before pulling out the oscilloscope or other more advanced debugging tools.
Once a motherboard has been recapped and cleaned, a power-on test with these BlinkHATs could quickly give you a general idea of the system state.Check them out if you’re into Macintosh computers!
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