Emax

well, seeing as we're tralking about what it's like to upgrade a version
2 emax, I started work on my version 2 board at home yesterday
afternoon, (having skimmed the mod sheet and seen all the drawings
thinking it was just a bunch of cut and rewires - and thinking "ooh!
simple!")

then as I was going through I got to the dreaded U13....

So I took the board into work today and just had the socket out in 2
minutes with a rework station, but if I didn't have one of those
available to me, it would have been a lot more painful - would require
cutting up the socket into pieces with your craft knife, and
pulling/cleaning every pin hole separately - a good half hour plus of
work, if you wanted to do a neat job.

so tonight I'll hopefully have time to put in the new socket (yes the
PCB has a footprint for a 28 pin part - they just only placed a 24 pin
socket... bastards! all this hassle, and future upgrade expense for
their customers, so they could save a fraction of a cent per build!) and
finish the rest of the cutting and wiring.

sometime later this week I'll double check my work, and then put it
together and see how the upgrade went.


I'd estimate for anyone going to a halfway decent tech with a basic
desoldering gun, that there's about 1.5 hours work from sealed case
without the SCSI mods to sealed case with the SCSI mods.... at least for
the version 2 PCB in an emax rack - not sure how simple the keyboard
comes apart and back together.



I'm also very very interested in taking a SCSI port out the back of my
emax.... half tempted to do a simple remake of the original emax version
2 SCSI adapter PCB. would be very simple to route and make. might have
to spend an hour or two working out what pins on the 50 way headers
route to the header that goes to the D25.... will research.... If I do
make a design up, I'll be getting a bunch of them made.... is anyone
else interested in this?





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