On Wednesday 10 December 2003 03:45 am, T. Joseph Carter wrote:
: Does anyone here do surface mount soldering or know anyone who does? I'm
: considering a memory upgrade for my TiVo. It comes with only 16 megs and
: adding another 16 involves adding two SMT chips and reconfiguring the
: device to use them. I'm told it can be done without special tools if you
: have a low-powered iron, tiny solder, liquid flux, etc, but the other
: prerequisites are sharp eyes (or good optics) and a steady hand. I lack
: these. ;)
I do, but Im not there right now :(
As far as what they say, Id say they have things backwards. You almost never
want a low power iron, you want a hot iron (but a very fine tip (and one with
aa slight flat surface works best). You gotta be good, and work fast.
Ive done a lot of repair from people that were not good.. it really sucks, do
it right, do it fast, and dont burn it.
A low watt iron gets everything hot before it melts the solder, and riskes
damage, a hot iron gets just the specific area hot, but risks burning (if
your not fast), and thermoshock.
Is it adding chips to empty locations? or is it piggybacking chips?
What is the lead/land size?
Pretty much all flux is liquid (unless your sweatting pipes, or doing stained
glass. Fluxes come in 2 catagories, waterbased and resin based. resin based
were phased out over 10 years ago because cleaning required solvents (we used
a lot of freon(sp?) back in the day... I did some testing and found that dawn
dishwashing liquid was about the best for stuff you could find around the
house (dont laugh, it really works!) The idea behind flux is to remove
oxides. Most of the solder you find will be resin core solder, and requires
solvents to clean (alcohol works, burned flux may need a little help with an
acid brush...), really burned flux may require an orange stick (or tooth
pick...)
ESD/EOS is a big consideration too... gotta be safe and not volt your
circuitry, or you will end up with dead tivo (or worse... psycho-tivo!)
Soldering really isnt that hard to do... Ive worked with a lot of people that
can do it in their sleep... but there are a lot of people that say they can,
but dont really know what they are doing... The only think I can suggest, is
watch them work on stuff before you let them loose on your tivo!
: Another option, apparently, is a new device that takes a PC133 512M DIMM
: and read-caches the entire database in RAM. That alone would probably be
: a decent speed boost, but it's a more expensive upgrade and would only
: affect the database.
uhh.... pc133 ram is fairly cheap... check ebay, you may find one for $20...
(prolly spend more like $50...)
:
:
: (For anyone wondering, I did attempt to find out and as far as I know,
: nobody has tried to overclock the 50MHz series 1 TiVo..)
hmmm... seems to me that if your CPU is 50 mhz, then why do you need pc-133
ram? isnt pc-133 for 133mhz bus? how do you get a 133mhz bus on a 50mhz cpu?
Is that a motorola chip?
Jamie
:
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