Have you ever built a circuit that should work - only to spend hours debugging before realizing one component was defective? That uncertainty was the problem my team and I were tasked with addressing for the Duke BME electronics labs.

Students were spending valuable lab time troubleshooting systems that were electrically sound, except for one hidden variable: a faulty chip. There was no quick way to verify if the chip was working - so we set out to design one.

Our solution was a dedicated PCB chip tester that allows the chip to be connected in isolation. By removing the chip from the larger circuit and placing it into a controlled testing environment, users can immediately observe LED outputs that validate core functionality.