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News on this project: I have designs which work, both DRAM-only and DRAM-plus-flash. This project has been thoroughly weird. As mentioned before, only one of the 10 I assembled (dram plus flash) last time worked at all (the first one, which gave me a false sense of hope). I revised that...

Generally speaking, the hybrid and power manager are the cause of a lot of issues. There are plenty of other options though, like corroded traces to RAM and other things.

Two hybrid recreations have been claimed by some of our friends in Europe, leaving two available for USA-based testers. DM me if interested.

There have been some questions about PCB color for the later production modules. I lean toward green, but can understand that people might want something closer to the original color (blue). What do people think?

PCBs arrived early, so I assembled and tested one this morning. It passed testing both on the dedicated test PCB and in a test Portable, which gives me pretty high confidence that it's going to work in general. These will probably not be listed and available for sale until after the conference...

PCBs for the first round should be here Wednesday. I'll hope to assemble and test a few before the weekend, it's going to be hectic and then I'm at a conference from the 8th to the 14th.

A new Optical Drive BETA Release has just been posted: https://github.com/androda/F4_BlueSCSI/releases/tag/1.1-OPTICAL-BETA-2022-07-27 This BETA release is based on the same branch from our friend @mynameistroy as the upstream Optical Beta. CD images are specified with "CD" instead of "HD"...

A new firmware release has just been posted. This one is not a pre-release, it's a full release. No issues were reported in the past month with the snapshot, and I haven't had any issues in testing. https://github.com/androda/F4_BlueSCSI/releases/tag/1.1-2022-07-27 This version is the same as...

Your F4Lite unit is not compatible with firmware for the original BlueSCSI. Only F4 and F4Lite specific firmware binaries will function properly. I don't yet have a build of this beta branch, it's something I need to work on. Been doing a lot of hardware-related prototyping recently. On the...

Unfortunately I don't know anything about the 520-like machines. Would be nice to have one for poking around at.

I don't own a Mac TV, but to my eye that capacitor pad probably goes to this via. It's the positive side of the capacitor (based on the curved silkscreen marking). If you check from that via to various other capacitors and chips, it will probably be connected to a power rail.

I'm hoping to have time soon to do all the calculating and get things in the right place for LC 520 and similar. With the SCSI port facing the right direction on my products, it should be easier. And I have yet another revision of the connector end that should make it even easier to line...

The pin spacing is standard 2.54mm. Was worried about that at first because they could have easily done something totally custom. But the mounting holes are for machine pin headers, not standard ones. I have a machine pin socket installed on a portable for testing, and exerting force properly...

After prototyping around a little more with opamps, I have sent in a new PCB design for manufacture. As mentioned in my previous post, this will be using all-new opamps instead of new-old-stock for better parts availability. The machine pin headers that are necessary for installation (mounting...

There are two major factors. Ceramic capacitors have a dramatically lower "ESR" than most electrolytics or tantalums. This means that they react dramatically faster to voltage fluctuations, and not all circuits are ok with that. Maybe an electrolytic was used to provide 'bulk capacitance' but...

Ceramic capacitors can't always be used to replace electrolytics. Their big advantages are neither exploding (tantalum) or leaking (electrolytic) ever. But not all circuits like them.

The display is rather unhappy with the ceramic caps I used, very wobbly. Guess I'll switch to tantalum, as much as I dislike those. Or maybe I can find teeny tiny solid polymer electrolytics.

Here's a fun tale about the differences between older parts and more modern ones. I have found a replacement opamp that works in place of the original OP20H. But this new opamp was causing odd behavior, where the 5v rail would *sometimes* (not all the time) spike up to full battery voltage for...

Recently I picked up a PowerBook 100 for cheap because it lacked the CPU card. Fortune favored me in that the CPU card was available from a seller in Tunisia and not labeled for the 100 - they had it listed by part number. Starting up the old machine resulted in the sad mac code: 0000000E...

@techknight has tested the one I sent over, and it's basically working. Revived a Portable that had been sitting around for something like 7 years. The caveat here is that the battery meter on his portable doesn't go all the way to "full "when it should. This is interesting, because testing...