Logic Board - Macintosh SE Reloaded

Kai Robinson

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I am happy to report a successful build with the latest version of the board from MacEffects.
I followed @JDW's wonderful videos and BOM/instructions and everything seems to work great on the first boot.
:)
Just curious, what's the board revision printed on the PCB?
 
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tmtrains

Tinkerer
Jun 21, 2022
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Guys ! I fixed it totally !

Now starts up great with a crisp picture, perfectly centred. (pictures probably coming soon).

Besides replacing U2B, I removed C67, which as marked as optional, but which I had populated. Also, I did plug the floppy drive, but that was not causing the issue. The Mac now starts with or without the drive.

I would recommend to never populate C67. Which is weird, as it is present on schematics, but on none of the SE boards I have.

Reading schematics and probing components is the way to go.

Hello!

I'm encountering the same sad mac error (with nothing connected, just power). Aside from randomly replacing chips, what are ways to narrow down what on the board is causing this?
 

JDW

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** Due to eBay sellers such as 'svintag' and 'vintagix' taking the github files from the repo, strip all attributions and violate the CC-NC license, the github repo has been marked as private, permanently. No files or sprint layouts will be made avaliable publically. Anyone wishing to purchase a board can still do so from MacEffects **
Two Idiots. Not surprised by that, but it's very disappointing!

I am perhaps @MacEffects biggest fan, not only for their insanely great store offerings, but also because Mark J. is an honest, friendly, and just the nicest person you'll ever know in your life. Even so, this will restrict people to buying only the one color (red) and style (gold ENIG) offered, since MacEffects will be the lone seller.


The secondary problem is as you can see — OUT OF STOCK

But even when it comes back IN STOCK, if somebody wants a matte black without gold ENIG, there's no options.

I think this impacts people who reside outside the USA most, in light of shipping costs.

I do NOT want to steer people away from MacEffects, because they are outstanding. But at the same time, I'm a huge fan of choice. So if more choices can be opened up in the future, while at the same time take a sledgehammer to those who are actively seeking to RUIN THE EXPERIENCE FOR EVERYONE, that is the ideal.
 

JDW

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I think that is a poor reaction.
@Kai Robinson
The response by callan brown is an important consideration. If you go back to his earlier posts in this thread, you'll see he had an issue with his MacEffects board (no fault of MacEffects, of course), and that brings up the topic of INVENTORY and BOARD REVISIONS. While it could be said that "everything is now fixed," there is no guarantee of that. So if MacEffects is now restocking the current revision board and still has stock 1 year hence, and if some other problem is found within the next year that prompts you to make a board revision, people would need to mod the MacEffects board because they would have no ability to use the newest GitHub files to have the board custom made at a PCB maker.

Honestly, most people would rather buy from a vendor local to them rather than buy 5 silly boards (which REALLY ruffles my feathers) from a PCB maker in China. Who needs 4 extra boards??? But at the same time, there are the caveats I just mentioned.

Anyway, I'm just talking out loud in hopes these points of consideration will help. I truly LOVE the SE Reloaded board and build experience and want more people to try it. I think it's a far easier build than an SE/30 Reloaded. I like thru-hole soldering more than SMD, and that's why.
 

Kai Robinson

TinkerDifferent Board President 2023
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See, if there are vendors elsewhere who want to license it from me as Mark at MacEffects has done, ie, sellers in the EU, UK, AUS/NZ that wouldn't be treading on Mark's toes, so to speak, I'd be happy to consider it.

Likewise, if someone wants to approach me on the forum and ask for a copy of the gerbers, I might be inclined to do so.

But no more public files available for all (at least in the short term), not now I've been burned for a second time, in a similar manner.

This happened in the first place with Alex Perez of RHC, who took my non response to his query (through an account that was entirely not recognisable as his) to license the SE Reloaded to him, as permission to sell boards on eBay.

Now two sellers on eBay, one in Germany, one in Italy, both selling the same boards, with all the silkscreen removed, in violation of the license?

Selling off spare boards to cover the costs of production runs for yourself? Sure, I get it, that's OK! That's fine with the terms of the CC-NC licence. But selling multiple units, commercially, for prices that are clearly going to result in a profit, that is not OK.

Sorry but sledgehammer time has come.

The same thing happened to Stephen Leary (aka TerribleFire) in the Amiga community, people just straight up trying to pass his work off as their own, to make money, when they had done zero work or expended zero effort other than remove his name from it.

His reaction, in comparison, was scorched earth. Erasing his entire YouTube channel, every post about his stuff, entire forum accounts, his whole github - all gone.

I don't think I'm being unreasonable in wanting to curtail the kind of behaviour I'm seeing.

At the end of the day, no one is entitled to someone else's work for free, unless the creator is OK with that.

I want the community to benefit from my work, I've seen the results of it, it's been great to see.

What's not great to see is other people profiting off my work.
 
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Kai Robinson

TinkerDifferent Board President 2023
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Also, revisions of both boards have effectively stopped since I barely do any electronics work anymore, so future revisions won't be something I'll be doing.

The latest revision to the SE Reloaded wasn't even a fix, merely a breakout pin for an additional address line to experiment with using the Macintosh Classic ROM, so not really necessary. At this point the only cock ups can come from manufacturing errors.

Again, if trustworthy people want to do a group buy, want the files and my help to sort the pcb options at whatever board house they want to use, I'm happy to provide the files free of charge.

These won't stop being available just because the github has gone private, I've still got the design files on about ten different storage media and cloud services - it's just there are a few more hoops to jump through. Less than ideal, absolutely, but the only thing I can think of that will stop people profiting off my work.
 

callanbrown

New Tinkerer
May 10, 2022
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The end result of taking down the gerbers will be that the sellers on eBay will be the only ones to produce them, because they'll be cheaper than MacEffects anyway. There's a certain point where open source is open source and it's just better for the people of the vintage community to have them, maybe this project is there now?

It's your right to do what you want but if you're not actively trying to make money from it I don't see the point in going backwards. I have a copy of the gerbers, so do dozens of other people I'm sure. I won't share them if you don't want them shared but others will.