Digital IC Checker

Digital ICs, such as NAND, NOR, AND, OR, XOR, Decoder, and Encoder ICs, are essential building blocks for creating digital circuits. I keep a collection of these ICs in both DIP through-hole and SMD packages. After repeated use in various breadboard circuits, some ICs occasionally develop faults, such as one or two non-functional gates or complete failure of the IC. Identifying faulty ICs can be challenging, especially when they are part of a larger circuit. Therefore, I prefer to test these ICs before using them in a new project. However, manually testing all the combinations for every gate is a time-consuming process.

To address this issue, I came up with a simple yet unique solution to automatically test these ICs using a Raspberry Pi Pico. I mounted the Raspberry Pi Pico on a PCB equipped with several IC sockets to accommodate different pin counts, along with some passive components and voltage regulators.