Stuff and Things.

[rubber_jonnie]

@rubber_jonnie as I recall you were going to build the netusbee board you had. Any progress on that front. Now that I have found renewed faith in the device it may be easier to build the board I have than ordering another.

Wow, I just put all the items from the NetUSBee BoM into my shopping basket, and it comes to £75. That's not including the ISP1160 or the Realtek (I already have this one).

Cheaper to buy one from Lotharek at just uner £50!! It's going to have to go on hold temporarily as I already bought a Greaseweasel and some other stuff. I'll either stagger the parts buy, or pause it for a bit.

Now I remember why I put it on pause before.....

[PaulJ]

@rubber_jonnie , I agree that the effort and cost to build one exceeds the cost and effort to just buy one. At some point I'll buy another but shipping from the EU has got very expensive. You also have the bonus of the purchased one has a case.

[rubber_jonnie]

@PaulJ I will probably finish it, but it's way down my priority list right now with that build cost.

Projects as of now are:

1. Greaseweasel build. Just need the time to build
2. Amiga A1200 recap. I have the kit, just need the time.
3. Test out my Atari 8Bit UNO cart. This could be a game changer by having multiple carts on an SD card, especially with my SIO2SD as well. More time required.
4. Amstrad Alt386 - I think this needs some bodge wires to fix due to a leaky battery, plus a capacitor or two on the mainboard. Pretty much salvageable IMHO.
5. Mac Classic. Repairs in progress but looking a bit desperate :(
6. Build my 2nd H4! No rush on this as waiting for the HDMI adapter.
7. Build my TF536. Where did all the time go....
8. Build my 2nd EPROM emulator from Mr Morley.
9. NetUSBee. When I have the inclination and funds...

There may also be one or two other minor projects out there. Oh wait, I still need to do the Oscilloscope section of troubleshooting basics!!

Spent the last 2 1/2 days painting and decorationg, and out all day tomorrow. Fingers crossed I'll get some time over the weekend.

I also need to start clearing out crap from my workshop so that when we come to move house it's not a nightmare to do!

[rubber_jonnie]

I sort of jumped to number 4 on my list this afternoon, mostly because it happened to already be on my workbench. I'd been thinking about removing an electrolytic (C121 in the pic) near one of the two LS chips close to the RAM connector. It looked manky, so I took it off the board and also removed the closest LS chip due to what looked like corrosion, and concern it was badly corroded underneath. I was right to think so because there was a horrible gooey mess and some serious track damage:

Alt386_pads_3.png

There were no less than 5 damaged tracks out of 12, which is pretty severe for a tiny 33uF 10v SMT aluminium can electrolytic.

Bad_cap.jpg

Don't trust these buggers! I have tantalums coming to replace it.


Close up of some of the damage:

Alt386_Leaky_cap.png

And I cannot overstate how useful it was having a microscope in finding these tiny damaged tracks:

Microscope.jpg

On screen you can also just about pick out the other damaged tracks from a small battery leak too. Thankfully I have been able to stich together a pic using printed images that I can use as a map to bodge wire it all back together again.

Fingers crossed once I fix the total of 11 damaged tracks, the thing will boot again :)

[Tomswork]

Those look like classic corrosion in the trace to pad dibit those capacitors are deadly in any computer


Tom

[DoG]

Is there no protection/lacquer left on those tracks? Locks like bare copper.

[rubber_jonnie]

Is there no protection/lacquer left on those tracks? Locks like bare copper.

I had to clean the lacquer off to trace the tracks in order to make a repair plan. The lacquer is quite dark, so even with a microscope, finding the breaks was really difficult.

I used a fibreglass pen to clear the lacquer as it is quite controllable compared to other methods.

I'll re-lacquer before I re-assemble, but there's going to be a few bodge wires too.

[rubber_jonnie]

Those look like classic corrosion in the trace to pad dibit those capacitors are deadly in any computer


Tom

I'm coming to hate those little round SMT cans!

[atari030]

Amen to that, I have a Marantz DCC player that is an absolute bastard to fix. From what I've seen they had a 100% failure rate on the read/write board SMD's.

[rubber_jonnie]

Amen to that, I have a Marantz DCC player that is an absolute bastard to fix. From what I've seen they had a 100% failure rate on the read/write board SMD's.

Going to re-cap my Amiga very soon, hoping those nasty little buggers have behaved themselves!!

Also a source of problems on my Mac Classic. They are everywhere and need to be removed and binned! Long live Tantalums!