Author Topic: Upgrading Your C*k (Read 78391 times)

daniel3000 · « **Reply #30 on:** December 14, 2005, 03:35:30 am »

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Guys.
For BGA soldering/desoldering you need a device called BGA soldering station. They are like $30K new but can be bought used for much cheaper on eBay.
A buddy of mine bought one for himself recently for around $1000. He plans to build his own supercomputer .
Anyway, desoldering and soldering on this device is as simple as placing the board in the device, programming the time and temperature.
For desoldering the device blows hot air on the chip, then a suction cup lowers and picks up the chip. Soldering is the same, just in reverse. It is all automatic. The tricky thing is for different size chips different size heads and air skirts are required. And since he just bought this device I am not going to trust him with soldering on my Zaurus ;-)
Anyway, according to him BGA soldering/desoldering is easy when you have proper equipment. BGA chip reuse and reballing is supposed to be easy and boring as well (when you have to reball many chips).
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Can you apply the heat to specific chips in such a device?
From what I have heard, such a device is only able to solder / desolder entire circuit boards at once.

More convenient, much cheaper but a little bit risky seems to be usage of a hot air blower and some metal shields to prevent the heat to damage surrounding parts.

daniel

0xDEADBEEF · « **Reply #31 on:** December 14, 2005, 05:07:56 am »

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Can you apply the heat to specific chips in such a device?
From what I have heard, such a device is only able to solder / desolder entire circuit boards at once.

More convenient, much cheaper but a little bit risky seems to be usage of a hot air blower and some metal shields to prevent the heat to damage surrounding parts.

daniel
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The BGA soldering station is a complicated programmable hot air blower ;-)
Yes, the it applies hot air locally. The head of the device is constructed so it only blows hot air at the chip and the sides are protected, hot air is then routed to back up so it doesnt heat up other elements on the board. My buddy told me that it needs different size heads for different chips though so it doesnt heat up surrounding area and chips.

You can probably solder and desolder using some hot air blower. But you will not be able to control temperature and time and airflow. On this thing you program temperature and time, select solder or desolder and press a button ;-)

Newer soldering stations have additional laser alignment tools, cameras to monitor position of the chip and lots of other goodies.

Da_Blitz · « **Reply #32 on:** December 15, 2005, 09:27:33 am »

Been looking into a hack that allows us to only need to remove the chip, resoldering the chips may be able to be done with a standard soldering iorn with this mod

the advantage is that we can also support up to the 1GB of ram the pxa supports: effectivly its a daughter card with a section that lines up where the chips used to be which we pour solder down to make the connection but will come preloaded with bga ram parts as well as the adress decoding logic to support more ram

kind of complex to imaginge but easy to egineer

upstart7 · « **Reply #33 on:** January 03, 2006, 09:46:13 pm »

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Been looking into a hack that allows us to only need to remove the chip, resoldering the chips may be able to be done with a standard soldering iorn with this mod

the advantage is that we can also support up to the 1GB of ram the pxa supports: effectivly its a daughter card with a section that lines up where the chips used to be which we pour solder down to make the connection but will come preloaded with bga ram parts as well as the adress decoding logic to support more ram

kind of complex to imaginge but easy to egineer
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I contacted pocket pc tech, as a friend suggested,
he has a Dell axim and is considering their services.

[a href=\"http://www.pocketpctechs.com/main~unit~Dell_Axim_X51v-509~area~upgrades~item~D51-064-128RAM.htm]http://www.pocketpctechs.com/main~unit~Del...-064-128RAM.htm[/url]

From what I gather, the Dell memory,
and Zaurus are similar BGA, and size I dont know about speed, I'll have to
check on that. Here is the response I recieved.

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Hi carl,

We have not evaluated the unit.

Regards,

Leonard

If enough of us are willing
to pay for their services, maybe they might actually look into doing upgrades for
Zaurus models. $169 might seem a bit much, but I'm sure you need a soldering station to do the upgrade, so my soldering iron is out of the question.

Carl

Da_Blitz · « **Reply #34 on:** January 04, 2006, 09:04:16 pm »

you need a bga reworking station that blows heat in a very tiny cone

im in, the parts i belive are simmilar or thesmae part number and as for speed the xscales cant handel anything greater than 100mhz, that siad i would rather pay extra to get a 133mhz part or even 150mhz if they can find them (they do exsist)

the reason i want this is that the pxa gets its arse kicked when acsessing ram becasue of a number of factors but its the primary reason why it was no faster than the stron ram series of processor, however if you run from cache and have a good compiler then this is reduced greatly

btw quick update, been working on a "soft mod" at the moment that consists of a special kernel (i can hear people groaning now) bassed on the 2.6 series of kernel as well as optimised programs to get as much speed out of this thing as we can, also it means i can have a command line only setup which i have wanted for awhile (althogh pdaxrom has fixed that to some degree)

the usb bluetooth hack is posible and as i got a soldering iorn for doing surface mount parts i might start experimenting, however just note that internal bluetooth in its current state makes you lose usb client (you have been warned) however you can just use a usb host to host cable

Da_Blitz · « **Reply #35 on:** March 01, 2006, 04:53:21 am »

ok after getting some feedback from people who are intrested in the list of hacks i have put up (feedback = reqest for status ) i thoght it was about time i updated. in addition i plan to keep this thread up to date on hardware hacks for the c??00 (regex) , i will update my first post to reflect what we have achived

at the momont we have confirmed an internal USB host port and connected stuff to it, this means that you can now have any USB acessory you want inside the casee if it fits, if it dosent then you can think outside the square and look at making a new case for it, how does a 22 in 1 card reader/hub sound to you, i like the idea of 2 SD slots and 3 CF () details at https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=13562&st=165 and http://www.iral.com/~albertr/linux/zaurus/wireless/

VGA out is possible with some acceleration throgh USB, so if you like the above hack maybe make a docking station instead, the USB vga card i am talking about is bassed on a USB to pci bridge with a pci video card bassed on the sis315 chipset and can take over specific Virtaul consoles allowing you to have a console on your zaurus and X on the adaptor or the other way around (my pearsonal pref) more info at http://www.winischhofer.at/linuxsisusbvga.shtml and pics of the product http://62.245.135.196/internet/distec.nsf/..._contrl_USB.htm for a post from someone who did it https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=11129&st=15

and finally the ram hack - IMHO the coolest and hardest hack to pull off that said it is possible and after some thinking i did 2 mins ago the best way to do it would be with a PCB to hold all the chips (up to 1GB that had an area of vias that hung out to the side, you line up the vias with the PCB and SLODER THEM WITH A NORMAL SOLDERING IORN (sorrf for caps but it means that i have finally solved the hardest part of the problem: how to solder BGA parts without damadging the other chips on board, if you are intrested and have electrical experince conntact me as i need to talk details with some people as well as beta testers, now anyone with a soldering iorn will be abel to do the hack

Da_Blitz · « **Reply #36 on:** March 01, 2006, 06:08:21 am »

added accelerometer and updated stuff on frount page, may be doing SDRAM hack in near futre

MONVMENTVM · « **Reply #37 on:** March 02, 2006, 09:51:07 am »

i would like to make the ram mod... looking forward for a detailed "how-to"...

Thanks man!

Da_Blitz · « **Reply #38 on:** March 02, 2006, 09:51:20 pm »

i am thinking of buying a c3100 to experiment on as this is a one way mod that willl break the device if you stuff it up, basically at the moment i just need to check numbers

expect more news in a week

Da_Blitz · « **Reply #39 on:** March 09, 2006, 09:43:01 am »

added gsm/gprs hack, updated 2700g hack and ram hack, enjoy

speculatrix · « **Reply #40 on:** April 17, 2006, 06:14:25 pm »

*bump*

sounds like you and Guylhem will need to get together and launch your own PDA!

I can't help but feel the HTC uni would be a better place to start. Or, persuade Dialogue (the Flybook people) to do a smaller version of the flybook (shame about the price!)

Da_Blitz · « **Reply #41 on:** April 17, 2006, 11:02:02 pm »

Read other post i have always had some plans ready to go, problems always cost, in small runs there would be no cost savings but what you would save you could easily invest for a Massive increse in performance

i like the uni but want 2 CF slots, i am starting to hit some of the limitations of this device (for vga out) that are becomming annoying

speculatrix · « **Reply #42 on:** April 18, 2006, 05:34:30 am »

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Read other post i have always had some plans ready to go, problems always cost, in small runs there would be no cost savings but what you would save you could easily invest for a Massive increse in performance

i like the uni but want 2 CF slots, i am starting to hit some of the limitations of this device (for vga out) that are becomming annoying
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snag is, as ever, trying to fit more and more computing power into the smallest space... or add more features and make the device bigger (would the Z sell as well if it were say even just 0.5" longer and wider? I think the relatively poor sales of the 6000 answer that).

Da_Blitz · « **Reply #43 on:** April 19, 2006, 06:18:25 am »

True thats why i like the backpacks of the old compaq series

enodr · « **Reply #44 on:** October 25, 2006, 01:41:08 pm »

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[EDIT] I found a way to solder new chips easily, my original thoght was to use a daghter board only for RAM sizes > 128MB however if you always use a daghter board then you can postion the board over the removed ram's holes and apply solder down the vias, this works for soldering the ram chips to the daghter board as well meaning you can do this with a normal soldering iorn, i need to talk to some people but all sounds good at the moment, "no skills required" â„¢ and best of all it would work for any PDA based on a PXA chipset, this would also mean you could use surface mount or BGA RAM parts, just buy the correct daghter board, you could even salvage RAM from old SDRAM sticks, 1GB here i come [/EDIT]

[EDIT]Looking good, may move to a seperate thread as it can be usod on basically any PDA HOWEVER anything over 128MB gets large quickly and would chew alot of juice (in other words i cant wait to try it), the daghter board at the moment is the size oy a small clamshell in theroy (in practice et mmay be slightly larger) the problem is that the pxa27x dosent play nice with stupidly large RAM (i had to say it) eg > 512Mbit and supports only a few select configorations [/EDIT]

Da_blitz, any update on this? This seems so interesting. The Zaurus really deserves a RAM upgrade!

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Author Topic: Upgrading Your C*k (Read 78391 times)