exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Oh! That's a surprise. The 68030s have arrived in the post.

One of them has some bent legs.

I wonder if they work.

Most likely these are relabeled (at the very least).

I know, I know. But what else can you do? It was only about £20 for two.

The surface does look as though it may have been sand blasted.

Have you had a chance to test these, Stephen?

Quite interested in how they perform as I never got to deploy mine.

Cheers,

BW.

Not yet. I've not got around to starting the hardware hacking again after the new year.

Well, I decided to try to fit one of those 68030s on the adapter board today...

First I thoroughly cleaned the board.
Then I put on the flux.
I put the chip on and aligned everything.
I carefully added solder paste. Just enough, not too much.
I used hot air to melt the solder.
A couple of the pins had shorts and one wasn't connected. I managed to sort most of those out.
I then decided that maybe reflowing the solder would help the others so more flux and a good heating all around.
Looked good...
Allowed it to cool for a minute or so.
Took it over to the magnifier, fumbled and dropped the board on its edge from about 1cm...
The chip flew off, hit the desk and bent pins!

:cussing: :sigh: :WTF: :stars: :dizzy:

I think I've mentioned before once or twice how much I detest surface mount stuff. I give up!

It's about time I forgot about trying to fit the TF536 into the machine with the keyboard fitted. Definitely time to think about ways of making a modified top for the ST and an external keyboard enclosure.

stephen_usher wrote: 25 Feb 2021 17:14 The chip flew off, hit the desk and bent pins!

Ah, bad luck. Those pins are total bacofoil, though, aren't they?

I think I've mentioned before once or twice how much I detest surface mount stuff. I give up!

I've never got into solder paste, stensils, reflow and the like. I did my QFP 030 by hand with a head-mounted loupe. The only problem I had was those damned pins. Ended up with one on the end looking like the Kinky Boots poster.

Hopefully one day you'll get bored, straighten the pins out and have another crack, although I do doubt you'll get it to 50MHz reliably.

Definitely time to think about ways of making a modified top for the ST and an external keyboard enclosure.

I've often contemplated, a 3d-printable keyboard enclosure as a bit of a desk-space enhancer. It'd have to be quite complicated, in many sections with seams and clips and whathaveyou, but I doubt there's enough demand to do an injection moulding run like the A500 peeps have.

Keep us up to date!

BW.

Badwolf wrote: 25 Feb 2021 20:15

Definitely time to think about ways of making a modified top for the ST and an external keyboard enclosure.

I've often contemplated, a 3d-printable keyboard enclosure as a bit of a desk-space enhancer. It'd have to be quite complicated, in many sections with seams and clips and whathaveyou, but I doubt there's enough demand to do an injection moulding run like the A500 peeps have.

Keep us up to date!

BW.

I envisage cutting up one of the STFM cases I bought from Exxos and using plasticard to fill in the rear. Making up an extension cable for he keyboard itself shouldn't be too difficult. (Famous last words.)

I've been playing around with the IDE again but I'm getting no further.

I've been trying to make up the correct swap cable and really could do with a proper pin-out diagram.

I tried flipping over wires 3->18 (swapping both bytes and the bits within them). The identifier shown in HDDriver went from strange characters separated by spaces to "Q"s separated by spaces.

I tried flipping 3->10 and 11->18 ribbons and got a different character separated by spaces.

I tried swapping 3->10 with 11->18 and get just blanks.

All don't get the drive information back properly.

Is it each pair of wires which need flipping?

Here's a video demonstrating the system and how quick and easy it is to switch between CPUs and OSs.