One day at my work we were all talking about expensive chairs. We were looking them up on a fancy office furniture website. There was one there which just looked like a normal chair, except that it was a thousand dollars. We were joking about how comfortable they must be for that much money, until s...

My plan for the weekend was to apply solder paste directly to the IC leads before placement. But it turns out it wasn't as simple as I was hoping. I had a lot of trouble getting the right amount of paste applied to the IC leads. toaster-reflow11.jpg This was done using a set of dentist's tools which...

exxos wrote: ↑

Tue Aug 11, 2020 2:11 pm

I was looking at such ovens and pizza ovens before I thought "nope" and just bought a proper oven

Where's the fun in that?

Interesting, I had been considering a reflow oven based on something like this, but with some micro-controller based Ben Heckery added for temp control and timer. Would be nice to at least have a pre-heater for hot air based reflow activities. Great minds think alike! I have a stainless steel therm...

The following weekend (this one just gone) it was time to try real soldering. I used a little too much expired solder paste to place a resistor on an old HDMI mod board and chucked it in! After guessing where to turn the dial for the perfect reflow profile, I got a result. toaster-reflow7.jpg Next i...

My first thought was "I should melt something!". So I scrounged up my bag of old solder-contaminated crud that I've scraped off my workbench and soldering iron sponge over the last 20 years and threw that onto a tray. toaster-reflow3.jpg After switching on the oven, a large cloud of toxic smoke eman...

Yep. Me again with another hare-brained scheme. :dizzy: I impulse-bought one of these $29 ovens at K-Mart and decided that the almost impassable mountain of junk in my garage could be bigger. toaster-reflow.jpg It is packed with features: Low flammability sheet metal construction Dial goes all the w...

Atarian Computing wrote: ↑

Sat Aug 08, 2020 3:53 pm

Volunteering to test a prototype if possible

Well I'm only planning to make a few of these, since it takes a long time to build them by hand. I'll keep you on the list

As far as I remember from owning an STFM a long time ago, but it's normal for the 9-bit palette to look a bit 'duller'? It's relative. It may be duller than another device plugged into the same monitor, because it is down to an absolute voltage that is applied to the video signal - but that brightn...

Exellent work investigating and diagnosing this! Having gone through similar thoughts for the HDMI mod (since it outputs 8 bits per colour), in my opinion the ideal solution is to repeat the palette bits without gaps, i.e. for each colour, a 3-bit brightness represented by bits 123 (for STFM) should...