Arduino ZIF Tester

ZIF (zero insertion force) sockets present an excellent method for interacting with chips, without the normal risk of bending pins when you try to jam them into a normal socket or breadboard. Having a chip interact with an Arduino board presents an even greater challenge, they’re not designed as dedicated testers, and you’d need to run connections this way and that to properly route electrons.

The Arduino ZIF by rehsd takes care of both problems as a shield that sits on top of an Arduino Mega, mounting a magical 40-pin ZIF socket. This enables the user to easily pop in ICs, such as the precious C64 PLAs tested in the video below, and secure them with the flip of a small lever.

The board includes a series of programmable LEDs, along with a power indicator. Also included are a series of jumpers to set certain pins’ VCC/GND/signal usage, and another set of jumpers allows for reading analog outputs. It’s a rather versatile board, meant to help with chip interactions, and as rehsd notes, it should come in quite handy.

You can see a short demo video of the device in action below, testing good and bad original C64 chips, as well as a newer device made on a PCB. The first test procedure allows rehsd to save serial output for later analysis, and the device can be programmed as needed to suit your needs. Code and design files are found on GitHub.