The Iron Krten Bench

Stop buying expensive, black-box test equipment. Build your own modular lab instruments from scratch using the $6 Raspberry Pi Pico.

In this hands-on guide, you will learn how to design, solder, and program a complete suite of test gear. Rejecting high-level abstractions, this book dives straight into bare-metal C, multicore processing, and custom PIO assembly to squeeze every drop of performance out of the silicon.

You will build:

• The Motherboard: A central chassis that manages an I2C LCD and a custom rotary encoder UI, cleanly dispatching events across processor cores.

• The IC Tester: A dual-Pico architecture utilizing a custom Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) to test and auto-detect 40-pin retro logic chips.

• The Frequency Generator & Counter: High-speed waveforms and measurement tools pushed to their 8-nanosecond limits using hand-rolled PIO assembly loops.

• The Arbitrary Function Generator: A purely hardware-based programmable truth table using shift registers, look-up tables, and diode logic.

Whether you are preserving vintage computers, reverse-engineering old hardware, or you simply refuse to buy what you can learn more from building yourself, this book gives you the schematics, the source code, and the low-level theory to take absolute control of your workbench.