With all the parts ordered and in hand (which is quite a job in itself) - new parts, not salvaging from an old board - it took me one very full day to do a full board - I deliberately set out to do it in one sitting to see what the effort was like and I was surprised how much it was to be honest. But I don't really like THT soldering - SMT is so much easier and faster.Out of interest, how long did it take you to solder everything onto the new board?
If you buy one of TheBoardFolk boards with the four PLCC sockets already applied, and all the SMT 'birdseed' capacitors and resistors already there for you, you skip quite a bit of work - this is what my statement above is based upon.
I'm actually in the midst of building up two more just now, and writing up a document to explain what I believe is the preferred build order, adding small blocks of testable functionality one at a time. You may be surprised how little is actually required to get life from the ARM on an A3000 board (just 3 support ICs) and POST running (three more ICs and the ROMs). I very, VERY strongly suggest building up and testing one part at a time otherwise you've got the potential for a fault to be "anywhere on the board" which would make fault finding much harder.
A POSTbox is really helpful for testing as you build, but it's certainly not essential and probably isn't a sensible investment for anyone just building up one board anyway. I've tried to document some test techniques that can be done with just a basic oscilloscope - at a pinch, even just a multimeter with frequency display could do.
Statistics: Posted by IanJeffray — Wed Mar 19, 2025 9:34 pm