[Gllug] Open Source Hardware User Group meeting on Thursday.

[Andrew Back]

On (23:17 07/05/10), Nix wrote:
> On 28 Apr 2010, Andrew Back uttered the following:
> > I long for the days when you could repair computers to component level (~
> > 80286). But they're more or less gone
> 
> What? You can still do it, although it's really annoying and difficult (you
> pretty much have to do it by buying several motherboards and cannibalizing
> some of them, and you need a good bit of specialist equipment). But nothing
> fundamental has changed there, not really. The CPU and other chips remain as
> impossible for anyone to repair as they ever were; the non-
> photolithographically-constructed components remain possible to repair.

Right - like anything is possible given sufficient time, money & inclination
etc. So you get yourself a hot air rework station, wrestle with some QFP ICs
and hope you don't run into any BGA packages. How do you test? Do you hope
you can sufficiently bring up software or at least BIOS/PROM? Or perhaps you
have extremely deep pockets and can afford application-specific automated
test equipment. I suppose you could just hazard a guess and swap bits
out. Regardless, it's a lot of effort for a board worth next to nothing
and is fairly boring due to the consolidation of many functions onto a small
number of ICs.

Not quite the same as assembling or repairing a system made up from much
smaller building blocks, where everything is through-hole and you can poke
around with far simpler debug tools. And if you're feeling adventurous
hack/expand with bits of wire, piggybacked DIL package ICs, toggle switches
and LEDs etc.

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Back
mailto:andrew at osmosoft.com
http://carrierdetect.com
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