I have an EMP-21 universal programmer from Needham’s Electronics which has been out of business for some time. This was a rather expensive programmer and it works well with the chips I have been able to program without adapters, but without adapters and pinout data it is quickly becoming a paperweight. I’ve just recently discovered this site and it looks awesome, so perhaps someone can give me some help. My questions are twofold:

Would anyone in the community have any adapter pinouts available for the Needham programmers, specifically for the E21-TSOP56-J3 adapter which I am in need of now? Needham adapters were specific for these programmers, so getting pinouts available for other programmers and adapters has been of no help, and I have searched endlessly for this specific data. Hopefully someone has one lying around and could trace it out for me.

Second, is there any way of identifying the signal description at each pin directly from the programmer? This would allow me to make my own adapters for various packages. I have tried to reverse engineer the software with no success, and taking voltage readings with a voltmeter has also been unsuccessful.

I know that ultimately a new programmer may be necessary, but I hate to discard a perfectly good programmer, and the experimentation is half the fun! Thanks in advance for any help, I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

 

Work from the data sheets of the IC's it could program.

 

Thanks for the reply, I have tried to go that route, but the pins do not hook up one to one for this particular adapter. I know where each pin (A1, A2, Vpp, etc) is located on the chip, but can't match it to the pins on the programmer, and can't find a logical way to identify the programmer output. The pin outputs are configured within the software, which can't be reversed.

 

Hope it doesn't become a handsome paperweight.

 

Lakaka21, I'm only able to see the first page of each of your pdf files, am I doing something wrong? Thanks much for sending the info, and could you expand a little on probing with a voltmeter as you recommended? I think you're on the right track!

 

Just a followup, are you saying that the pinout for the E21-TSOP56-J adapter matches the intel strata flash directly pin to pin? I didn't think this was the case.