Two weeks ago I took this 486 away from its 25 years sleep at my mum's attic… It was quite well stored and covered, except little did I know back then about Varta, Destroyer of Worlds.
I then spent way too much time cleaning it, removing components…
checking and fixing traces…
fixing vias…
fixing more traces…
testing them, and coating them with solder mask…
I even redid the missing silkscreen references, because I still had sleep to skip I suppose…
And I dug one of the missing pads to find the ground plane and fix it.
Then I cleaned up the components, most could be reused (I added a socket for the IC as it was clearly loosing legs).
And during Dave's stream I assembled it back:
And fried a tantalum cap.
But guess what: it worked \o/
It better be, after all those hours. I added a crude CR2032 mod and assembled the case:
And I was greeted with a working hard drive, now I remember customizing the autoexec sequence to look like Linux boot from the era.
I'll quickly image the disk just in case, but I'm quite pleased how it worked out, I just hoped I'd spend less hours on it.
I then spent way too much time cleaning it, removing components…
checking and fixing traces…
fixing vias…
fixing more traces…
testing them, and coating them with solder mask…
I even redid the missing silkscreen references, because I still had sleep to skip I suppose…
And I dug one of the missing pads to find the ground plane and fix it.
Then I cleaned up the components, most could be reused (I added a socket for the IC as it was clearly loosing legs).
And during Dave's stream I assembled it back:
And fried a tantalum cap.
But guess what: it worked \o/
It better be, after all those hours. I added a crude CR2032 mod and assembled the case:
And I was greeted with a working hard drive, now I remember customizing the autoexec sequence to look like Linux boot from the era.
I'll quickly image the disk just in case, but I'm quite pleased how it worked out, I just hoped I'd spend less hours on it.
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