exxos blog - random goings on

[DoG]

LOL. Classic Eagle.

[exxos]

Nobody will ever know...

Works now :D

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[exxos]

Finally got one of the many projects back from PCBWAY :D

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[exxos]

Finally found the GAL22V10's I purchased ages ago. Legit ones at that! Also not cheap either. But got a few programmed and started to test some boards and CPUs.

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[exxos]

Thought I would take a close-up shot of the soldering on PCBWAY. It is pretty good overall. I cannot make up my mind of the through-hole parts are actually done by machine or hand it is that good.

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[exxos]

Have been using my gas soldering iron to heat up the CPUs for testing them out. A lot of the CPUs are just failing to function at 32MHz :( oddly they always seem to fail exactly the same way :shrug: but they do work perfectly well at 8MHz.

Anyway my gas soldering I decided it would not strike up any more :roll: But thing is if I took the nozzle off I could see the spark and the gas was flowing and it would flame up every single time perfectly. His time I put the nozzle on I could still hear the gas and see the spark down the tip and yet it would never ignite :shrug: messed around with it for almost an hour.. and gave up in the end I just bought a new one.

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The annoying thing about this iron is you have to move the yellow thingy out of the way in order to use the striker lever :roll: I don't really see the point in a but it it makes it incredibly difficult to use. So going to see if I can remove it without destroying the thing next.

[exxos]

Begone stupid yellow thingy!

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[exxos]

This is not going well testing CPU's for 32MHz.

The pile which do work in the booster.

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and the ones which don't.

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Things never used to be this bad with the things. But the last batches of CPU's they don't seem to be pushing as much as they used to. So I am having to test a lot more together one which will run at the high-speed :roll:

So I think once these 100 or thereabouts boosters are done, I think this will be the last batch of them I will be able to produce as it is just taking up way too much time these days. The problem aswell, as I have said before, because so many of the GAL22v10s are fake feeds, they do not work in the booster very reliably. The GAL's I have now are genuinely purchased and even pre-covid were £5 a pop. Does not sound much until you think I have to buy 100 of the things. Then there is no guarantee that all the boosters will even sell. I'm taking a huge gamble on getting a batch of 100 done as it is. So again I think this will be the last batch of these STE boosters produced. Otherwise the price it is going to have to go up like double to cover all the time and costs involved.

[Badwolf]

This is not going well testing CPU's for 32MHz.

The pile which do work in the booster.

Has the booster changed?

BW

[exxos]

Has the booster changed?

Nope. I've tried some CPU's in other batches of the booster and same thing happens :(

I did wonder about screwing about with the GAL firmware to see if I could do anything. Problem is that rabbit hole tends to drag on for weeks :roll:

EDIT:

Spent 10mins messing with the GAL code but not much there to fiddle with. Just ends up making things worse. Only thing which helps is removing the ROM boost wire. But just means spending less time in 32MHz anyway. Oddly even freezer spray doesn't improve things. So I dunno.