Hackaday0 Hot2 min
Fixing An Expensive Amprobe Cable Tracer With Mystery Fault
A £2,000 Amprobe cable trace kit that stopped booting after years of storage was diagnosed and repaired by a YouTuber. After ruling out power and display issues, a serial console revealed the NAND Flash boot image failed validation. Desoldering the TSOP 48 Flash chip and comparing its dump against a known-good one revealed flipped bits in the bootloader section, likely from leaky Flash cells losing charge over time. Writing a corrected image restored the unit to booting its Linux 2.6-based firmware. An attempt to use Google's Gemini chatbot for diagnosis reportedly wasted time before manual firmware inspection found the fix.
