Lots of things happening at work, so it’s good to do a little meditation by soldering in the evening. Guillaume sent me a Greaseweazle kit but the STM32 still looks like the next level of soldering to me. It makes 0805 components look large. I’m missing a 74F257 that was lost in the mail, so the 060 adapter has to wait for a while. But there are other ways to treat an A3640 rev 3.1.
First, a socket for the oscillator will make it easier to test a little overclocking.
Since the A3640 provides the clock for the Amiga mainboard, the chipset and memory will get a tad faster, too. This hack is super easy and will cost you 2 bucks for a socket and an oscillator.
The next and a little more involved one is an upgrade of the v3.1 card to v3.2. Gladly this is a simple GAL update, but unfortunately the GALs are not socketed. This leads to a brief intermezzo with my favorite tool ever, the hot air rework station.
I had left the temperature at 245 degrees C from a previous experiment. Not good enough to take the part off. Let’s up it to 275 Celsius again (530 F) and the GAL slides off smoothly.
Be careful, this process does not need any force whatsoever. If the pads are slightly corroded or have been messed up before, they might lift off if you’re not careful. That makes for tedious repairs, don’t do it.
Cleaning up the pads with solder wick and isopropyl alcohol is essential before working on them again. Small unevenness can rip the pads off when cleaning.
The Conitec Galep 5 is a beautiful device to program everything from GALs to EPROMs to microcontrollers. I’m glad I still have mine from the beginning of coreboot times, but a TL866 is a more cost sensitive solution.
I’m using low melting point solder paste and the hot air rework station to put the GAL back on. I’m not happy with the 28 pin sockets I have, so I don’t bother putting one on.
With a little more time I can also apply the speedgeek Wait State mod, but that will require reprogramming another five unsocketed chips.
For now this is the end result:
And it still works and is stable:
