exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

So I saw this video a little while back: Fake IC's and in it, Lee used a chip identifier/tester, so I bought one to see if it was potentially useful, since testing with my TL866 requires a bit of set up and it generally doesn't ID chips for you, plus it is limited to logic IC's AFAIK.

This is the device:


And like Lee, mine is missing the 'r' from Search, so you get 'Seach'. Internally it is quite a complex wee beastie:


However that complexity belies the fact that it's actually a flawed device.

It does mostly work, and identified most items I threw at it and once identified, I could test the IC. However randomly some fairly obvious LS IC's didn't ID though known good. Also it only works with HC and LS that I've found so far (I am going to test some more)

This includes 555's, CD4051's, 74LS and 74HC, and if you go through the list there are quite a few options for testing. Sadly the lack of any instructions does make it rather difficult to understand just what you can test. I'm sure a little experimentation would reveal this.

If you're considering one, my recommendation is even though it's just under £20 delivered, for me it has too many flaws to be really useful, so I wouldn't bother.

OK, so I spent a little more time playing with this tester and here are the results:

74 series - often misidentified as LS, sometimes ID'd as 74__
74S series - often misidentified as LS, sometimes ID'd as 74__
74F series - oftenmisidentified as LS, sometimes ID'd as 74__
74HC series - Correctly identified. This isn't a surprise since it does have it in the manual testing selection. DB of IC's is missing some entries though.
74HCT series - misidentified as HC
74LS series - Correctly identified. This isn't a surprise since it does have it in the manual testing selection. DB of IC's is missing some entries though.

It also seemed like some common IC's such as 74LS244 and 245's could not always be identified as not seemingly in the DB. A 74HC245 was identified though.

The list of 74LS IC's seems spotty, even when specifying manually.

Also, some 74 series ICs were misidentified, such as a 7400 being identified as a 74__06, which certainly isn't the same thing.

I also found sometimes it simply wasn't sure and gave one or more guesses as to what it was looking at.

It did also ID an NEC 555 (Under the AMP section BTW) I fed it, and also correctly identified the CD and MC IC's I gave it.

Sadly I couldn't find an op amp to test it with, though I know I have some about somewhere.

So overall we have the situation of great idea and poor implementation.

If it had a larger DB of ICs and could be updated easily then I'd say it was worth £20, but as it stands, I'd say that if it were £10 then the price matches the performance.

I guess if it has it in its DB then you're good, otherwise no thanks, and the DB just isn't up to snuff.

If you're just using it for LS or HC then it's probably fine but you will have ICs it simply doesn't recognise.

While ordering a couple of chips from Ami, I included this tester with the order.

Testing was easy and fast, and I was quickly able to detect the 74HLS chips that were in fact 74HC chips, so I got my money back for those.
It already payed back half the cost of the unit.

I hope it can be updated in time to support more chips and have better detection.
We'll see...

STC12C5A60S2 is a single-chip microcontroller based on a high performance 1T architecture 80C51 CPU,
which is produced by STC MCU Limited. With the enhanced kernel, STC12C5A60S2 executes instructions in
1~6 clock cycles (about 6~7 times the rate of a standard 8051 device), and has a fully compatible instruction
set with industrial-standard 80C51 series microcontroller. In-System-Programming (ISP) and In-Application
Programming (IAP) support the users to upgrade the program and data in system. ISP allows the user to download
new code without removing the microcontroller from the actual end product; IAP means that the device can write
non-valatile data in Flash memory while the application program is running. The STC12C5A60S2 retains all fea
tures of the standard 80C51. In addition, the STC12C5A60S2 has two extra I/O ports (P4 and P5), a 10-sources,
4-priority-level interrupt structure, 10-bit ADC, two UARTs, on-chip crystal oscillator, a 2-channel PCA and
PWM, SPI, a one-time enabled Watchdog Timer.