Our 'chip riser' PCB's are designed to solve the problem of needing to get at the pins of a socketed chip from the component side of the board, without messily soldering directly to the top side of the pins and ending up either overheating the chip, shorting pins together, or accidentally soldering it into the socket! They were originally designed to help with circuit bending jobs where you might want to solder to sound ROM or sample RAM IC pins to create some kind of digital audio glitching modification, but you don't want to run a bundle of wiring all the way under the board. As we had some interest from people wanting them in different sizes for various other jobs we decided to design a few different versions and put them up for sale.

Maybe you want to attach test probes to an IC but you don't want to solder wiring directly to the pins on the component side. Maybe trying to remove the main board to get at the solder side is a massive pain in the ass, and you need to safely access the pins on the top of the board. If so, these are the helper boards you need.

The boards work by simply removing a chip from its socket, plugging it into the chip riser board, and then plugging the whole board back into the vacant socket using the pins on the underside. The unit will then work exactly the same but each pin of the chip is available on a solder pad on either side of the chip riser board. You can solder directly to the pads, solder in header pins, or just use the pads as an easy way to connect probes or test shorts for circuit bent effects.

We only supply the chip riser PCB, so you will also need to source an IC socket of the appropriate size plus two lengths of turned pin headers

The chip risers come in 5 different sizes:

Most CMOS, DRAM, PIC, AVR etc are covered by the thinner DIL format versions on the green boards:

SIZE A: 14-16 pin

SIZE B: 18-20-22 pin

SIZE C: 24-28 pin

EPROM's, sound ROM's, older RAM, larger microcontrollers etc are covered by the wider DIL format boards in red:

SIZE D: 28-32 pin wide

SIZE E: 36-40 pin wide

When a board covers more than one chip size, just install the size socket you want to use as shown on the board, so on the 18-20-22 size board, if you want to use it for a 20 pin chip, just install a 20 socket as indicated on the silk screen, and two lots of ten pin strips of header pins underneath in the appropriate places either side. You'll have a couple of pins left over at the top of the board, but its a hell of a lot easier using one board for 2 or 3 different sizes than supplying a different board for every single chip size!

We're selling the size A, B and C in strips of 4 boards for $7 and the larger size D and E boards are 2 boards for $7.

Take a look at the datasheet below for a short build guide.