This Willem Eprom Programmer V4.5 build should have been an easy one but it turns out, when you have the wrong parts without knowing it, it turns into a much harder job.

Building the unit

Most of this build was fairly straight forward other than I had to swap the ZIFF socket out as it was cracked right through the middle. Some of the parts were not easy to find and I had to get them through a friend from mouser like the CD4503 and the CD4015’s.

The never ending Parallel Cable fun

My choice to use a parallel/db25 extension cable would come back to haunt me. I tried using a gender changer adapter to get it to work but no matter what I did, it would just not detect it on the PC. I soon found out that the ‘Parallel extension’ cable I had purchased was actually a DB25 serial cable and not all the pins were actually wired. Once I had desoldered the connector, put on a female DB25 connector on the board and used a different fully wired cable, the device sprang into life!. So a word of warning, make sure the cables have all pins wired up.

Another thing to check, is that you need to use the right version of the software. For the V4.5 board, I used the 0.97ja.