On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 11:43:47AM -0500, Jamie wrote: > I do, but Im not there right now :(
Well, I was kinda trying to avoid sending it somewhere.. > 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. They suggest tinning the tip and just using it to press the lead in place. That's all it takes for the tiny leads.. > 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? Empty spaces on the board next to the existing memory. Here's the link to the upgrade for my model, including a reprint of the soldering instructions which appear on the forum: http://www.9thtee.com/tivomemory.htm > 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...) I believe it is still common to see solder use resin core, but a liquid flux is recommended for this rather tan relying on the stuff in the solder. > 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!) Yeah, I'm a bit concerned that they don't talk about this. DRAM is notably picky about ESD. > 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! It was mainly something I was considering doing if I am going to add more space to the thing, which is something I'm planning to do actually. > : 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...) True enough, but the upgrade card is not. ;) > : > : > : (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? I suspect that any DIMM I could find would work, including PC66 and slower. The bus is 25MHz after all. I think they're just assuming that at this point it's pretty much all PC133 for SDR memory and that anyone who would know differently knows what they can use. > Is that a motorola chip? The series 1 is, yes. Series 2 machines are ARM chips, 4x the speed, and twice the memory (isn't that right Bob?) The Series 2 machines are not very hackable since the ROM verifies that the ramdisk is signed by TiVo before it runs anything and the ramdisk replaces any modified boot files with fresh copies. If you defeat the ROM (that is, dump it, modify it, make a new ROM chip, amd replace the existing ROM on the TiVo which is a SMT chip), you can then modify your ramdisk not to blow away your changes. Once your changes are not blown away, you can tweak your TiVo to your heart's content, until a new software upgrade replaces the ramdisk with one that blows away your changes and hopefully doesn't turn your TiVo into a brick when a ROM verification fails, leaving you without a TiVo till you pop the cover, put the drive in your PC, boot a custom Linux dist, and tweak everything until it works again.. Needless to say, despite how slow they are, we rather like series 1 TiVo. You can open it up and add a network card (series 2 boxes have USB ports for this purpose) and stream data right off your TiVo (pay extra to do this on a series 2 box), even copy shows from one TiVo to another (not possible with series 2) or extract video across the network, strip out the commercials using video editing tools for archival, and then put it back on the TiVo for long-term storage.. =) _______________________________________________ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
