One of my favourite snifters, that. Cheers!

Wrong socket and wrong positioning for the P&P machine in the factory. Pity this machine doesn’t have a serial so we can trace where it was made. Fixed now.

Factory, this one. The soldering is too uniform for it to be a kit. Chip is correct too, just wrong socket and wrong placement.

(Unless later kits came with the sockets preinstalled)

Also, I've stared at this keyboard long enough this week to know that the 'S' is upside down. Must fix that.

Hehehe. I'm guessing you're not alone either 😁

I just need to get the ETI 64k RAM board working with the others and it’ll be done 😄

There was an excellent video this morning of people chucking themselves down that slide in tribute to the cop - the slide was never fixed or removed so it's still the same. I want a go now.

Ah feck that’s sad. A proper presenter and broadcaster. May he RIP.

Happy cakeday! 🎂

May it be in 8 bits.

Indeed. The chap I got it from wasn’t the original owner so I’ve no idea who the builder was.

Innit. I’d not checked voltage using pins 7 and 16 on the LS chips because all voltages were present on the backplane. Why would GND not work on the board itself? No wonder it looked cold and dead to a thermal camera.

Yes folks, the previous owner of this board literally cut corners, and in doing so destroyed the ground plane. This is why the board looked dead - it was. Two swift repairs later (some cussing too) and we're back in business. I just need to make a keyboard interface now.

Meanwhile, I was concentrating on 2 caps, one of which showed dead in circuit. All caps are supposed to be 47nF decouplers, yet these two were different. Checked them out of circuit and they were good, but way overspec. The trace next to C2, a big tantrum between 5V and 0V, looked wrong. It was cut.

This is the back of the board. Notice anything... odd about it?

I'd possibly narrowed the issue to the lack of clock at L2, a 74LS74. This clock appeared if L2 was removed but was squashed with L2 present. Weird. I swapped chips with good ones, changed the socket, checked for tin whiskers and bad flux. @fuzzweed.co.uk suggested a bad decoupling cap so in I went.

When I found out what the issue was last night, there was quite a bit of colourful language. Pleased the vicar wasn't in enjoying some tea.

Nice Chopper, mate.

😆