I do love seeing people build these boards up - i get the warm fuzzies from seeing machines being saved that would have been trashed!
The boards really do look good in red, too.
The boards really do look good in red, too.
A battery bombed SE stored in a garage for years
- Thread starter tmtrains
- Start date
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- mac se se reloaded
An update:
I managed to break one of the legs on the SND IC trying to remove it from the original board, so that just got added to my order from UTsource.
The ROMs were not recoverable, and I'm waiting on an EPROM programmer to get the PLCC ROM replacements in place.
The hakko soldering pump is still not working well, so I've relied on a heat shrink heat gun to extract ICs from the board after a round of using my manual desoldering pump.
I managed to break one of the legs on the SND IC trying to remove it from the original board, so that just got added to my order from UTsource.
The ROMs were not recoverable, and I'm waiting on an EPROM programmer to get the PLCC ROM replacements in place.
The hakko soldering pump is still not working well, so I've relied on a heat shrink heat gun to extract ICs from the board after a round of using my manual desoldering pump.
I'm planning on just spray painting it with some clear rustoleum, I just need to figure out what I need to keep masked so the grounding still works.
Another visual update. I believe I have all the components on the Reloaded board:
You can see I also put back in what was left of the bracket, since it will be needed to provide a ground connection to the rest of the chassis.
What's left to do? Plenty:
* Inspect the rest of the circuit boards (I've taken a look at the analog board and it looks good, need to check the power supply)
* Scotch-brite the metal components and spray paint them with the clear rustoleum I have (masking off the key ground connection parts)
* Reassemble the machine to some state where I can at least see if it will power on
* Probably remake the ROMs since I'm not confident I assembled them well
* Figure out if I can recover any data off of the hard drive
* Refurbish the floppy drive
* Obtain a long term mass storage solution for this
Thanks so much to @Kai Robinson for creating this board, and @JDW for his extensive video and text documentation it's been a fun project to put together.
You can see I also put back in what was left of the bracket, since it will be needed to provide a ground connection to the rest of the chassis.
What's left to do? Plenty:
* Inspect the rest of the circuit boards (I've taken a look at the analog board and it looks good, need to check the power supply)
* Scotch-brite the metal components and spray paint them with the clear rustoleum I have (masking off the key ground connection parts)
* Reassemble the machine to some state where I can at least see if it will power on
* Probably remake the ROMs since I'm not confident I assembled them well
* Figure out if I can recover any data off of the hard drive
* Refurbish the floppy drive
* Obtain a long term mass storage solution for this
Thanks so much to @Kai Robinson for creating this board, and @JDW for his extensive video and text documentation it's been a fun project to put together.
Another progress report. Sorry, I don't have any photos:
* Recapped the analog board and PSU board (again, thanks to @JDW for his video on the latter, particularly with how to deal with the extensive use of hot glue). I used the Console5 kits to do the recapping.
* Swapped out the exhaust fan with a Noctua fan
* Refurbished the floppy drive, cleaning it up (the front was clogged with dustbunnies), and lubricating all of the essential bits with lithium grease (and giving the upper plate part a spray with PTFE dry lubricant). I replaced the Gear That Always Breaks in the eject motor, and relubricated that whole part as well. I tested it on my IIgs to see if it could handle the basic operations (read a floppy, write to a floppy, and ejecting the floppy), all good.
* The floppy drive cage was a bit rusty, so off into the rust remover it went
I did an assembly of the boards and PSU and monitor to see if it would boot and.. no. No chime and the screen was a mess of vertical lines. Likely one of my ROMs is bad (I can't remember which one, but it's the one that I didn't solder very well). But no magic smoke escaped, so I'll take that as a win.
The main next thing to do is to soldered the newly programmed ROM PLCC chip onto the adapter board, which will be whenever I have a nice block of time to patiently deal with that.
Dealing with rust is less urgent given that I live in a fairly dry climate, but the floppy drive does have some of its metal bits that have rust on them. I'm tempted to just leave them be at this point, vs potentially damaging something by getting a dremel or wire brush touching something that it really shouldn't, or getting sanding residue into the mechanical bits. I haven't painted the frame, but that is sheer avoidance of doing the hard work of prepping the frame with some sanding / steel wool.
Edit: to add a quick shoutout to @max1zzz for his Mac SE PLCC ROM board whose files I used to order the SE ROM boards, and if I keep soldering them as poorly as I have been, I probably will need to get more.
* Recapped the analog board and PSU board (again, thanks to @JDW for his video on the latter, particularly with how to deal with the extensive use of hot glue). I used the Console5 kits to do the recapping.
* Swapped out the exhaust fan with a Noctua fan
* Refurbished the floppy drive, cleaning it up (the front was clogged with dustbunnies), and lubricating all of the essential bits with lithium grease (and giving the upper plate part a spray with PTFE dry lubricant). I replaced the Gear That Always Breaks in the eject motor, and relubricated that whole part as well. I tested it on my IIgs to see if it could handle the basic operations (read a floppy, write to a floppy, and ejecting the floppy), all good.
* The floppy drive cage was a bit rusty, so off into the rust remover it went
I did an assembly of the boards and PSU and monitor to see if it would boot and.. no. No chime and the screen was a mess of vertical lines. Likely one of my ROMs is bad (I can't remember which one, but it's the one that I didn't solder very well). But no magic smoke escaped, so I'll take that as a win.
The main next thing to do is to soldered the newly programmed ROM PLCC chip onto the adapter board, which will be whenever I have a nice block of time to patiently deal with that.
Dealing with rust is less urgent given that I live in a fairly dry climate, but the floppy drive does have some of its metal bits that have rust on them. I'm tempted to just leave them be at this point, vs potentially damaging something by getting a dremel or wire brush touching something that it really shouldn't, or getting sanding residue into the mechanical bits. I haven't painted the frame, but that is sheer avoidance of doing the hard work of prepping the frame with some sanding / steel wool.
Edit: to add a quick shoutout to @max1zzz for his Mac SE PLCC ROM board whose files I used to order the SE ROM boards, and if I keep soldering them as poorly as I have been, I probably will need to get more.
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Another update:
I remade the Low ROM and tried it out, but no dice
No chime at all, as well.
I'm hoping this is a pretty easy thing to diagnose.
I remade the Low ROM and tried it out, but no dice
No chime at all, as well.
I'm hoping this is a pretty easy thing to diagnose.
Following the advice of the folks on the discord, I've remade the ROMs, but I'm still pretty much where I was as of the last update:
If anyone has any pointers, I'd really appreciate what to look at next.
If anyone has any pointers, I'd really appreciate what to look at next.
Does anything change if you move the analog board to logic board harness at all? My SE was showing the weird artifacts before I changed out the harness for a different one. It didn't show the jailbar pattern, which, according to the Repair Mac site for the SE/30, says is RAM related...
Just tried wiggling the harness between the 2 boards and the pattern doesn't change at all. I did reflow the usual suspect on the analog board where the cable to the logic board connects to.
I'll try messing with the RAM sticks I have, but the contacts on them seem a bit worn.
Thanks for the help!
Ok, another update. I got some new (to me) SIMMs off of eBay and they arrived this past week, and installing the sticks did change the behavior.
Based on this thread over at 68kmla, it looks like the analog board needs another look. I had recapped it, but there might be more to inspect.
Based on this thread over at 68kmla, it looks like the analog board needs another look. I had recapped it, but there might be more to inspect.
I finally got time to double check this on the board, and sadly (well, from a troubleshooting POV), the chips in question are in the correct orientation on the board.
Note that the checkerboard is progress, in at least it's a different state of dead from before. The change, as noted above, was using newly acquired SIMMs.
Update:
I used the Pay to Win tactic and got a working SE FDHD board off of eBay.
What a working board confirmed for me that was that my Reloaded board mostly works, except for the ROMs. At this point, I have a number of PLCC EPROMs and SE ROM boards, so it's another weekend of soldering to build another set, but I'm not sure where I'm going wrong when putting them together.
I confirmed the Superdrive needs some more troubleshooting as it made some horrible noises and the Mac wasn't able to recognize any disks.
Unfortunately, there's probably some fault somewhere on my Reloaded board, as after one successful boot with the ROMs from the eBay board, I ran into a sad Mac error code (sorry, forgot to take a photo).
But I did get a BlueSCSI setup and got it booting, to some acclaim from my family.
I used the Pay to Win tactic and got a working SE FDHD board off of eBay.
What a working board confirmed for me that was that my Reloaded board mostly works, except for the ROMs. At this point, I have a number of PLCC EPROMs and SE ROM boards, so it's another weekend of soldering to build another set, but I'm not sure where I'm going wrong when putting them together.
I confirmed the Superdrive needs some more troubleshooting as it made some horrible noises and the Mac wasn't able to recognize any disks.
Unfortunately, there's probably some fault somewhere on my Reloaded board, as after one successful boot with the ROMs from the eBay board, I ran into a sad Mac error code (sorry, forgot to take a photo).
But I did get a BlueSCSI setup and got it booting, to some acclaim from my family.