0000001530 00000 n Oops. The history books have that blue LEDs were not commercially available until the mid-90s. These old Mercury-Lamp + Heater Combos drove the mercury quite hard which increased the temperature and pressure inside to a point where the mercury itself started to absorb a large portion of it’s shorter-wavelength emissions. \o/. It eventually worked, allowing [Charles]’ project, a vintage liquid crystal display, to have the right data using vintage-correct parts. 3 of 3 Article Reset. I erased an AMD AM27C400 by placing it in a laser engraver, setting the laser to about 2% (very low power) and setting it to try and engrave a dark black square directly over the eprom window – 2 very fast passes and about 20 seconds later and I had a completely blank eprom that I could then write to. Each color was a different process, it took “forever” before blue and white (I recall in that order) arrived. Learn how your comment data is processed. This also erased the eprom. The strong smell of ozone and nitrogen oxides the lamp produced made it difficult to understand how anybody would have exposed his skin voluntarily to the radiation of this lamp. So I do not need to use my dangerous 4W UV/C low pressure quicksilver tube. EPROM Erasers were in common use in the age of the MicroBee. That’s neat a single led consuming sweet FA power will do what my big metal box does! Erasure works on the whole EPROM not individual bits. xref Before their work the only LED colors were red, green, and the combinatorial yellow, and they were much dimmer and less efficient than the LED’s we have now. The plug should be fitted with either a 1 Amp or 3 Amp fuse. Sunlight erasure probably works much better at higher altitudes… like Everest maybe. 5. To erase an EPROM. The Motorola 68000, probably the most popular chip to come out of the 70s, has a shitload more performance than an atmega32. Took me quite a bit longer (winter in south pole). The fact that it has a clockwork timer in 2018 says a few things about it’s age :-). Appearance: EPROM has a transparent quartz crystal window at the top. 0000000016 00000 n 0000284219 00000 n Yes; the LED had the right frequency to flip a bit, and erasing an EPROM is a function of intensity and time. 0000002472 00000 n I still have it. Thats what I use to do back in the day. 6. It takes some time to erase the data in EPROM. Depends on the tube. The ones that the eproms wre designed for are the 253.7nm mercury line emmitting tubes (long end of UV-C), which are quartz and have no phosphor. The way they work is that every time you write one or more bytes in a page, that page is erased and rewritten with the old content + new content. The spectrum of iron is educational – lookit all that stuff at the top. Having said that the below "experiment" (proof of concept) makes the pacifier-sterilizer a quick & dirty alternative solution :) So... the EPROM I erased is an ST Microelectronics 27C256. To erase an EPROM chip it must have a glass window. We did have fun, about 1975 in high school, asking the physic’s teacher how they worked. For example asking manicure salon staff to expose chip in UV nail-polish dryer. 64 32 It was common practice to erase an old version of MWBASIC to a later one hence the scarcity of early version of MWBASIC. Hi Andreas, It depends on the intensity of the UV lamp in the eraser and how close the device is to it. Solar Flares And Radio Communications — How Precarious Are Our Electronics? These erasers contained one or more UV tubes and a timer. trailer (Probably the same for long term exposure with the tanning bulbs!). EEPROM contents are erased using electronic signal. These erased with the 253.7nm mercury line. Leaving eproms out in the sun long enough was said to work. In EPROM, UV light is used to erase the EPROM’s content. If they existed, they must have been used to erase chips in seconds, not minutes. Spoilers: yes, TIG welders can indeed erase EPROMs. brand geological prospecting / mining light to erase my 2708s and it worked very well. Again, no changes. Our ability to generate UV light has improved dramatically over the last fifty years, and [Charles] remembered he had an assortment of LEDs, including a few tiny 5mW UV LEDs. The Eprom Field Kit includes the EPROM+ software, manual, power pack, and cable. But in reality even after 20 hours it had not reset all the bits. All you really need to do is shine a LED onto a chip for a few hours. Use a 2.1 mm plug with the Put the chip right under it for hours and no erasure. 0000002039 00000 n Available power adapter variants: EU-Version (230 V/50 Hz) and US-Version (120 V/60 Hz). I put about two dozen EEPROMs with known code under those lights. 0000052471 00000 n Evgeny has added a new log for Serial Data Visualization. Back in the old days, when we were still twiddling bits with magnetized needles, changing the data on an EPROM wasn’t as simple as shoving it in a programmer. I built an eraser with a germicidal lamp in a short T4 or T5 tube (4-6w?). This can’t be done using electrical signals. You could buy them from digikey in the 90s, I know because I did and still have them! The thing is, that UV-C has no chance of going through the plastic housing of the LED, so it probably erases with longer wavelengths as well, just not as fast…. 0000251183 00000 n As fluorescent lamps go out of style, the nuisance erasure that we used to deal with is pretty much no risk. It wasn’t until he bought a 3W LED that he was able to erase everything quickly. Need an EEPROM eraser? 0000052082 00000 n I have never used the USB prommer with S5 EPROMS/EEPROMS , only the Parallel port type. Transistors used in EPROM have a higher resistance. I paid $10 for my first blue LED in the early 90’s. Ultraviolet Light is used to erase the content of EPROM. According to Wikipedia, the 68000 was “introduced” in 1979, but initial samples shipped in February 1980 and first production began in November. I bought a box off the bay for hardly anything and it only takes a few min to erase a whole batch of chips, but if you only ever need to do this once in a blue moon why not give it a try. Nah, the longer the wavelength the longer it takes. Repeat steps 1, 2 and 3 until the device reads blank. 0000283983 00000 n The BK manual states (https://bkpmedia.s3.amazonaws.com/downloads/manuals/en-us/851_manual.pdf): “When the eraser is working, the power lamp (LED) will light up, the wavelength of the UV lamp operates at 253.7nm (2537 Angstroms). 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