Emax

I was fortunate enough to be working at IBM at the time I retrofitted
my first Emax with SCSI in 1991. They were kind enough to let me use
their rework station, without which I would never have been able to
make the mods.

This time around I'm not so well-equipped to retrofit my Emax rack,
but I'm going to give it my best. I had forgotten about the 24 vs.
28-pin U13, so thanks for that reminder!

I'll post to the list with the results of the surgery. :-)

-Dave

On Sun, Oct 26, 2008 at 10:00 PM, Julian <jujulilianan@...> wrote:
>
> 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?
>
> --
> http://bleepin.com
>
> --
> http://www.fastmail.fm - The way an email service should be
>
>