Re: programmer for PLS100?

Den Thu, 30 Aug 2018 06:02:19 +0000 skrev "Baltissen, GJPAA (Ruud)"
<ruud.baltissen@apg.nl>:
> > ok, addendum: not something that will never pay for itself ;)
> 
> OK, EEtools sells it for $895,-. That made me wonder: I just checked
> Aliexpress and you can buy programmers as cheap as $20. I have a
> twelve year old Elnec LabProg+ with one disadavantage: it only works
> with a LPT port, something my laptop doesn't have. For this reason I
> got myself such a cheapo with USB and it works fine. So I wonder what
> justifies these $895? One could say it is like comparing an old Lada
> and a Rolls Royce but then I rather consider my cheapo to be a iX20,
> a car I'm very happy with.

There is a difference between professional and hobbyist programmers.
The professionals is at least supposed to adhere to standards better,
both from a hardware and software point of view.

I don't know nothing about the ones you mention, but for example having
hardware to support applying any supported voltage to any pin costs
more than only having hardware to supply voltage to the pins that most
IC's use.

Also for a professional programmer you can count on that the power
supply actually works even if you want to program a 2716 or any
other ancient IC which wants long program pulses and 25V DC at a rather
high current.

If you are looking for a second hand good quality programmmer I thing I
would recommend a Data-IO Unisite but (using extreme ESD precaution)
remove the hard disk if it has one, and replace at least one disk drive
with a gotek. If it's complainging about a broken driver board at
boot, you can move the driver boards around and leave an empty slot at
the right end, and "only" be able to program IC's with a few pins less
than the maximum supported. IIRC it supports 64 pin IC's so you can
remove quite a few boards before it becomes unusable. At the time it
was new it was state of the art, but nowdays especially having a hard
disk but also DD 3,5" floppys is more of a liability. The fact that it
has it's own 68k CPU and running the code internally is a guarantee
that the timing for all algorithms is correct though.

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