Raspberry Pi Pico Test Equipment: SIGNAL GENERATOR · FREQUENCY COUNTER IC TESTER ARBITRARY FUNCTION BARE-METAL C

Stop buying test equipment. Build it yourself.Ever spent hours debugging a circuit only to discover you were sold a defective batch of 74-series chips? Tired of wiring up the same basic oscillators just to test a display? It's time to take control of your workbench.In this hands-on guide, you build a complete, modular suite of test equipment from scratch using a handful of $6 Raspberry Pi Picos. Rather than relying on expensive off-the-shelf black boxes, you combine bare-metal C programming, multicore processing, and custom PIO assembly with practical hardware design.You will learn the design and implementation of: - The Motherboard - the control software chassis that coordinates the other components and drives realtime processing on a dedicated core- The Frequency Generator - three channels of square waves, DC to 62.5 MHz, selectable frequency/period mode and adjustable duty cycle- The Frequency Counter - a three-channel display of what's going on in your hardware- The IC Tester - a dual-Pico architecture that tests most 74-series and 4000-series parts, and even matches ROM contents against known patterns- The Arbitrary Function Generator - three channels of purely hardware-based programmable truth tables using shift registers, look-up tables, and diode logicWhether you're preserving vintage computers, reverse-engineering old hardware, or you simply refuse to buy what you can learn more from building, this book gives you the schematics, the C code, and the low-level theory to create indispensable tools for your bench.About the author: Robert Krten is an embedded systems developer with forty years in international telecom and embedded R&D, including BNR, QNX, and Cisco. He has authored books and training material on QNX and embedded subjects.