I have recently been working on building my own Superprobe. This is a cheap and simple tool based around a single PIC 16F870, a four-digit display and a handful of other parts. Hardware details and software can be found on the Superprobe section of the Mondo Technology website.


As the name suggests, at its simplest the Superprobe can be used as a logic probe, displaying an L, H or - if it touches a point in the circuit that is in a low, high or floating state. What makes it so "super" is that by using the two input buttons you can switch it to a different mode. The supplied software provides seventeen different modes, including a logic pulser, frequency counter, voltmeter, capacitance meter, signal generator and serial ASCII data output.


Measuring a 10uF capacitor.
Having such a wide range of functions for such a modest part count made this a very attractive project to build. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a 16F870 so used the pin-compatible 16F876A instead; porting the code from the older microcontroller mainly involved changing the list p=16f870 directive. I did notice that the probe didn't seem to save its settings when powering down as it should, so I copied the EEPROM reading and writing code from the 16F876A datasheet into the source to replace the existing code which seemed to fix it.


The insides of the Superprobe.
As I couldn't find a suitable low drop-out 5V regulator I opted to use a conventional L7805 regulator. This means that the input voltage has to be at least two volts higher than the output; I normally power circuits from a 7.5V or 9V supply anyway so this isn't too much of a problem. Finding a suitable battery to go inside the case was more of a challenge; there's insufficient room for the typical 9V PP3, sadly. A bit of hunting for "7.5V battery" led me to a suitable battery with a variety of names and a rather high price. Aided by a ruler and the dimensions on the above website it seems that the A175 is exactly the same size as five LR44/AG13 cells stacked on top of eachother (coincidence? I think not). A reputable high street shop noted for the quality of its goods sold a card of forty button cells (including ten AG13 cells), so five of those and a bit of masking tape provided me with a passable imitation. Sparing no expense, the battery holder is constructed from paper clips.

The 16F876A has more program space and SRAM than the 16F870, making developing software in C more viable. Not all of of the original software's features were especially useful to me, and I was likely to want to add new modes myself in the future, so set about reimplementing the functions that I did find handy in C. The result is quite a bit easier to modify; for example, the above photograph demonstrating the measurement of a capacitor shows a value with an SI prefix (10.1u for a 10uF capacitor). All one needs to do to display such a number on the display is call display_print_float(10.1e-6f); - the code does the rest for you. Sadly, this does inflate the size of the code significantly and my current version of the code only squeezes 11 functions into a much larger chip (compared to the 17 on the original).


Measuring a 2.2K? resistor.
One of the new modes is a resistance meter. This works by pulling the probe tip high using a known resistance (5K?, 10K? or 100K?) and combining this with the resistor to be measured between the probe tip and ground to form a voltage divider. The output of the voltage divider is measured, and from that the resistance of the resistor being tested can be determined. The ability to use multiplication, division and floating point arithmetic makes this easy to program in C; much more so than it would have been in assembly, at least!

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View Superprobe video demonstration on YouTube.
I have recorded a video demonstrating the Superprobe. The code for my variation on the theme can be downloaded here, and can be compiled with the free ("lite") edition of the HI-TECH C compiler.