exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Icky wrote: 30 Aug 2020 19:10 @rubber_jonnie - 153 pins. The stencil worked and looking at the pads they all had paste on each pad and not too much.

Ouch, that gonna be tough to get right, good luck sir!

Eagerly anticipating some updates and a chance to get me one.

Having been out of the Atari scene for a while it's fantastic to see projects like this and I can't wait to see the final adapter working and available. Excellent work. :D

Project is going slow at the moment. Some of our boards are still at the assembler as they have been in lockdown for a while.

In addition there is a lot of work going on in the background to provide a full experience with the Phoenix Shifter and we are also doing testing / debugging on the shifter core.

BGA's are not friction welded the are solder paste (reflow) like all other sm components, I used to program the pick and place machines and have never heard of 'friction soldering' I don't think the components would stand up to the force required. I know you can friction weld steel and other formulations but this is on metal objects like spacecraft etc not on fragile components. I have just come back to my ST after a 20 year break and would be fascinated to see how your v3 boards are coming along. Great project.

Brian

This project had stalled as the v3 boards are still at the assembler. We think that the lockdown has been causing issues with them as contact has been patchy. May have to write off the v3 boards.

In getting back into the PCB routing groove (live, the universe and everything getting in my way over the last 4 months) to mitigate the problem of the v3 boards I have spun a new version v4.

The v4 has been designed so that most of the components are preassembled by the PCB manufacturer on the bottom side leaving only a few to be assembled on the top side afterwards, cutting down effort etc.

These are currently at the PCB manufacturer being made.

great to hear to hear about the progress. Too bad about the stalling.

This is one of the most appealing project to me so far, along with the blitter recreation.

This looks awesome ! When you say that only the top side components will need to be soldered, does it include the BGA chip too?

Shipment arrived today so will be looking to build one of these up this weekend - "Fire up the Voltera" :)

Well that went better than expected. Time to build up the rest and test it out. If working will get a few more built up for @Smonson, @exxos to test.