exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

More 30 pin simms being produced today.

First up I got a new "pasting jig" made. The engineer is likely no longer talking to me, but I got the design I wanted in the end and fantastic it is! Expensive, but I needed a way to speed up production as aligning the film by hand and taping the stencil on while pasting.. well.. basically took forever.

Pasting Frame with Plastic Stencil.


Really expensive SMT Paste going on...

All pasted ready for adding parts.

Parts on..

Into the oven to cook for a while..

Hot stuff!

Cleaned up and checked.. Then into my 32MHz STE for testing..

Job well done And Finally...

A cat picture


Simms are now on sale in my store.

Packs of 4. https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/atari/store2/#0024



EDIT:

Simms now have one side with solder on the connection pads. Originally I had a thicker PCB, but it was a pain to fit. So I went for a thinner PCB only to find there was bad connections and a larger PCB would be better Turns out, that a lot of simms have a fair amount of solder on the pads and actually bend the sockets pins "out of spec". So when a "in-spec" simm board (the ones I make!) Tended not to make good contact in sockets which have had these "bad" simms in place. So it became a problem to have a thicker pcb and not have a thicker pcb at the same time! So I went with to solder up the pads to make the pads "thicker" but keep the PCB thinner.

As this solder is "random thickness" from pin to pin, it bends the simm socket pins more than others, which means a proper spec simm doesn't make good contact (but it does in a brand new socket!) . So in order to combat "bad simms" basically damaging the simm sockets, I soldered up my simms so the PCB physically fits in the holder, and is forced into shape by the extra solder on my simms, and thus makes good contact then!

3RD BATCH IN THE MAKING..

Hot stuff - literally

Will clean up and test tomorrow

Back in stock.. for now..

https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/atari/store2/#0024

Having huge problems sourcing DRAM, so invested a lot of cash in a reel of 1,000 . Should be good for around 120 STE sets then.. might take a while to build them all up

baby kitty became a beautifull lady cat.

I built up a new batch today of around 100 simms. I need to clean them up and test, so likely try and make a start on that on Monday

Starting to appear in stock now!

https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/atari/store2/#0024


Will be cleaning and testing more throughout today!

Done a lot of these today.. about 50. So expect about 10 sets going into stock again soon..

They been built up, and just coming out of the cleaner ready for testing..

Excellent, ordering now...

I've ran out of purple PCB's now. The ones in stock are the last purple boards to be made. The 2019 batch will be blue, simply as purple is not a option for the new PCB supplier. The blue boards are otherwise identical to the purple boards. Though if anyone wants a purple simm set, then grab one before they are gone!

https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/atari/store2/#0024