If you are looking for a new piece of test gear to help you with your next design have a look at what Matt from Openschemes has come up with.  He has taken a Top2005 EPROM Programmer and hacked into a Desktop Test Bench!

“Do you ever find yourself wanting an IC tester?  Some way to power up an IC and apply various voltages and signals to different pins, in order to either check functionality or to explore the inner workings of some mystery chip..? What we’ve done is traced out and bus-snooped a cheap EPROM programmer to decipher it’s inner workings in order to create an open, super-low-cost platform for digital IC testing and development.”