Logic probes are cool, I'm going to be troubleshooting digital circuits more often so I want one. But, they're weirdly expensive. That is except for one which is a kit which you can build yourself, for 1/3 of the cost of the nasty chinese ones. Since I'll probably need 2 in the future this sounded like a fun and economical project.
And afterwards, I'll show you how you can make your own out of wires, hot glue and sadness. It's really easy and you you only need 1 IC, some resistors, capacitors and a few LEDs
I got this kit from a UK company called 'Mitch Electronics', they make alot of these kits with the pcb and all the components for you to make yourself. This makes them all quite affordable. Only gripe I really have is that they use QR code instructions, which are terrible and awful and I hate the entire trend of everything having to be digital crap that will one day go offline and ruin christmas. But, we get everything we need, minus some croc clips. This kit also doesn't have a speaker, just LEDs but that shouldn't matter much
We have some LEDs, resistors, caps, and a socketed DIP that does the logic probe thing. It's only lacking a case but has some holes for mounting. I was thinking about just trying to find a particularly large pen and shoving it into that using hot glue. It's alot smaller than most logic probes which I happen to prefer, keeps the desk a little bit tidier. You could add a speaker if you were so inclined, but i'm good with just LEDs.
For the clips that supply power to the probe, I decided to one above and reuse this old 2-pin power port I had in the junk bin. It's small enough that it won't interfere with whatever case solution we go with, but also lets us connect croc clips to it instead of having them hard soldered to the board. Always remember to crack open old electronics to harvest parts since you'll never know when they'll come in handy. Except microwaves, CRTs and other dangerous things, of course.
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