It's a shame you said this series didn't do as well as some of your other videos, Adrian. These lengthy sagas of in-depth troubleshooting are some of my favorite content of yours! I'll keep donating if you keep making them, views be damned. 😉
For me, it felt like a lot of copy/paste from a spreadsheet and reciting of hex numbers. Useful if I wanted a tutorial, but less appealing as entertainment. A difficult line to walk. Can't please all of the people all of the time. Still a happy subscriber!
I also love this style of series! Maybe when the entire series is finished people people will be more lilely to watch since the series can be binge watched?
I was getting Dukes of Hazzard freeze frame vibes ("Bet those Duke boys wish they had a parachute about now!"), but then again je suis un homme d'un certain âge. I like the new meme a lot.
Ok, I want to make it loud and clear that I LOVE long, detailed “ride along” trouble-shooting g videos! I’m 70 and I spent my entire career troubleshooting electrica, electronic, and computer problems. I synch right up to Adrian’s critical thinking methodologies, and I ALWAYS learn something new on every video, whether it’s tools & techniques, or about a particular model of computer. This series was great from the standpoint of “Don’t give up !” I’m very proud of you for that. I’m not very experienced with Macs. I did go through a period where a client had a number of older Macs interfaced to scientific instruments in a biotec laboratory. I was mostly supporting their LAN & Internet connections, but there was a bit of keeping the Macs happy and contented. There was an SE/30 sitting in the storeroom, retired, so I messed with it a bit. They probably would have given it to me, but I didn’t think I was interested in it at that point. Ah, for the lack of foresight! Good job, Adrian! 💪
These videos are absolutely fantastic, because I have quite a few SE/30 motherboards that I need to fix and I've got renewed enthusiasm for tackling them again now.
The 8-bit guy: let's design and order adapter PCB Usagi Electric: let's mill adapter PCB Adrian: BODGE WIRE OCTOPUS! Anyway, congratulation on the victory, and what a victory it was!
The best thing about this series is turning an otherwise big mistake (frying half the mobo with 12v) into all sorts of new learnings, not just for these boards, but also for anyone with an old Apple computer. Bravo sir.
Same here, The Amiga was my home computer for a long time and would never give Apple house room , but I've done so much fault diagnosis on all sorts of equipment, mainly on Radar and Sonar equipment and custom CPU systems Z80, 8085 etc . that I can see most of the techniques I was taught being used here. Very well done, and it's a wonderful learning tool for any engineer to work through. Andy
I feel the same. I watch for the sheer enjoyment of seeing an old machine come back to life. But I would NOT ever want to use that old thing. So I am glad that Adrian is doing all the work and I don't have to. And I don't have to figure out what to do with the old machine afterwards either.
This has to be in the top tier of retro repairs on the internet (not just TH-cam!) I'm so glad you got it working, but really the journey of discovery with this series has just been amazing, thanks for taking us all along for the ride!
Adrian this is one of the best series I've seen from you it was so interesting to see how you fixed so many problems and slowly diagnosing everything piece by piece Good job
I only used computers, never repaired one on this level, i have no solder skills, i never used an oscilloscope. And still here i am watching these videos and been fascinated about them.
This was a great series!! I hope it does better and your views increase. This was great to watch and since I have been subbed to your channel it’s always been fun to watch your troubleshooting abilities. Cheers!!
Chiming in about the plcc soldering again. Solder paste is not the best rework technique, I stopped doing that long ago. i recommend getting flux that louis Rossmann uses (that is no-clean and way better than rosin). Apply flux to all pads. Then apply new (leaded) tin to the pads. With that flux around the tin will apply evenly when going slow enough. Gnd pads sometimes require special attention. When the result looks even, apply more flux. Place the chip. If necessary tack doen on one or two legs with the iron.Then heat up the entire chip, its legs, and the surrounding pcb area. Go in circles. Your nozzle was way too small, use a larger one and enough airflow and heat (the trickiest part as the right amount of heat depends on board stack, practice level and heat gun - I use more flow and almost max heat to achieve the shortest possible process). You will see when the chip sinks down. Its worth practicing this on dead boards first. This also works with larger chips like qfp144. You do not get bridges this way and a more even result.
You don't need solder paste. You can clean the pads, tin them, then add flux and then sit the chip on top and heat it with hot air until it slides into place.
One addition: You can't hold the chip down while applying the hot air, or it won't slip into place. If the chip tries to fly away, the air flow is too high anyway.
Hi Adrian, I've been watching this series very closely because I have an SE/30 that I haven't been able to repair after leaky caps and light battery damage. I was hoping to get the information I needed to diagnose and fix the board. I almost stopped watching when your repair fried that first board. Sometimes it's painful to watch you make mistakes, even though armchair technicians like myself make plenty of similar or more serious mistakes. I'm glad I kept watching because the information you shared including the reconstructed schematic and spreadsheet on serial port diagnostics is just what I needed. Knowing that others struggle to repair this era of macs and that it is possible to work through difficult failures makes me want to try again on my board. Thanks for sticking with this repair.
On the 020 and up, you use those special F-line instructions to talk to the FPU/PMMU. If the copro isn’t present, the instruction acts like a trap, allowing the OS to jump into a replacement routine. Seeing as the SE/30 was never meant to operate without an FPU, it makes sense that they didn’t include a routine for that!
Very well done, sir. I’m not sure about everybody else, but I absolutely loved this series. I don’t even have an SE/30 but your thought process and explanation of everything you’re doing makes perfect sense and is much appreciated. My SE FDHD is working just fine but I will eventually need to recap.
I've never owned an apple product, probably never will. I did watch every second of this series though and I've never been so invested in seeing an Apple computer startup as with this "12v" machine of yours! I love the memory chip adaptor you made, if it performs exactly as it should I think you should leave it just for the visual effect on the board itself, its cool!!
Hats of to that dead 2cx for being an organ donor for pretty much everything! Might as well go back and pull the CPU to replace the one you used from your stash.
Yesss, I love this series! Having refurbished an SE/30 of my own earlier this year, it's super interesting to see all the bullets that I dodged and the problems that I fortunately did not have to deal with. I also really appreciate the scientific approach to diagnosis, it's very educational and definitely will help to give me ideas when doing hardware repairs in the future.
Adventures on the 12 Volt Rail - sounds like an 80s movie! This is making me want to dig out my Mac II motherboard. No voltage adventures there. Just let it sit too long and the caps corroded it. Managed to get it to chime but no video. Probably my poor SMD repair skills.
@adriansdigitalbasement I'm no where near as smart as R2D2. It'd be more like Roomba talking to the Death Star lol. I'm digging through your videos now to find your technique for bodge wiring on these tiny traces. I've done it but I have a hard time avoiding other traces.
I really appreciate how you stuck with that seeming cursed board all the way through! Plus you gained a bunch of personal knowledge and helped expose Apple's advanced troubleshooting techniques for those machines. I have to wonder if other OEMs had similar tools for any other machines. I did break/fix warranty repairs on laptops & PCs for almost 20 years from the late 90s to the mid 2010s for a bunch of different manufacturers. It always frustrated me how the PC OEMs completely discouraged component level diagnosing of issues in favor of the parts cannon approach for warranty work. While simultaneously penalizing techs for using too many parts. This became especially true in the 2000s when all the major PC players changed how they viewed warranty repairs. The perception became warranty repairs were only a cost to their bottom line. Previously it was a value add to their customers and a good way to keep customers happy. They all figured it was cheaper to get new customers than keep existing ones (personal, small business & corporate alike) happy.
Ultimately the 12v-pocylpse made for a far more interesting repair series than the original repair would have been. I’m so glad you pushed through with this one, it was very satisfying to see the board working. I will likely watch them through a second time and I’m not even that interested in retro Macs. I do appreciate learning about retro tech and how innovative they were at the time and the fact they are repairable in our currently disposable world.
My introduction to computers back when I was in high school when machines like Classics, Classic II’s & LC II’s arrived at school from Apple, seeing this SE/30 gave me joy. Your recapping error gave the vintage Macintosh community a new diagnostic tool so more vintage Macs will get fixed and loved again instead of becoming e-waste
The fault finding is epic! Well done! A trick I learned from northridgefix is to measure some power lines of good boards using the diode test mode on the multimeter. Noting the voltage drop, when you recap the board a short to a data line would likely give a different voltage drop on 12V indicating a problem. Another trick when doing work on main boards is to use the flir camera and give a quick on/off power up/power down. If some parts shoot up in temperature you might be just in time to prevent permanent damage.
That's what I love about you is how to diagnose and identify the problem and fix it. Nice job, buy the way. I love watching your long videos. Keep the wonderful working
Bravo! Nice job getting the video chip working using a Frankenstein mod of sorts. It doesn't have to look pretty so long as it works. Kudos for saving this board and teaching us how to use the diagnostics
Hi Adrian. Solder paste is - essentially - eensie-tiny balls of solder in a rosin paste. It’s usually used with a mask; this is a thin sheet of etched steel or brass with holes where the pads go. You lay it onto the board, align it, then spread the solder paste onto it so the paste goes into the holes. You scrape it with the edge of something flat and straight, like the edge of a credit/debit card, or a small metal ruler, and this forces all the paste into the holes. Then you lift the mask and use hot air to solder the chip in place. Afterwards, you just clean the paste off the mask with IPA. The simplest solution is to design a PCB with just pads that fit the (dead) PLCC chip, and have the traces extend out to the edge of the board (like the edge connector on an ISA-slot PC peripheral). Then send the design to JLCPCB, or PCBWay. They generally require a minimum order of 5 boards, but this is okay, as you can use them to practice using the solder paste and mask. Also, if you have a spare good chip, you can solder that to one of these boards and use it as a test jig! HTH! 😊
Amazing! Thank you. I always learn so much from your videos. The BEST channel on Apple II and Macintosh repair. I followed one of your Apple II repair videos and managed to fix Rev 0 Apple II.
if the IC seems to not self align, You can try to push it very gently to see if they back to right position. Using lot of flux helps with self alignment and solder bridges
Have thoroughly enjoyed this series. Have great nostalgia for the old '030 as my first job was working on a bare-metal '030 workstation programmed via an in-circuit emulator which of itself was a marvellous piece of kit. Seeing the phrase 'f-line' pop up instantly triggered memories of Motorola terms for co-processor (any, not just the FPU, if memory serves) related gubbins. Now all that’s needed is for someone to write a GUI app around those serial diagnostics to ease their use - or even emulate the original test device 😂
Thank you Adrian for this series, it has been very nice to follow along on your journey! Just one tidbit I have not heard you mention: there is another reason that ceramic capacitors are not a good idea to use and that is their capacitance is voltage dependent, I can't provide direct links due to TH-cam censorship but if you Google for this you will get some good articles: capacitance voltage dependency ceramic capacitors
I've talked about it before and it is something to consider. I've done a bunch of testing and this is mainly an issue with circuits using the caps for timing (RC, etc) as the values being off cause issues. But for bulk capacitance like what's happening here or AC filtering like on the audio circuit, it doesn't matter at all. As long as you check the datasheet to make sure you aren't getting 4uf when it should be 50uf.
Where is the 2 thumbs up for an epic series? Amazing saga of troubleshooting and new discoveries. Brilliant! May you get 100,000 high 5s. What can we get you to kill with voltage next?
I've watched each and every one of your SE/30 repair videos (not to mention older videos covering many Macintosh models), as I have a particular fondness for the Compact Macs. It usually took a LOT to kill them. We had two Mac labs at my high school and one PC lab with 486 DX/2s, one student tech (me) performing all the repair/maintenance for all the Macs in the building (including administration offices) while two student techs handled the PCs. I was responsible for roughly quadruple the number of machines, from Pluses up to LC 575s, and I had the least workload because the machines were so robust. My most common "call" was for floppy discs stuck in drives, and almost always the issue was students shoving discs in with bent metal slides. The second most common "call" was for OS issues, because some students would load the System Folder with all sorts of third-party stuff that would conflict with each other or slow the machine down to a crawl. Well, sure, 1 MB of RAM on a 7.88 MHz Mac Plus, plus The Grouch and Talking Moose INITs and After Dark Screensaver (I LOVED After Dark, More After Dark, and all the expansion packs), what did you expect? System 6.0.8 was delightfully stable, but there's only so far you can push those machines without RAM upgrades. 1:04 - In the auto repair field, that's called "firing the parts cannon." 😁 47:19 - I just cheered! First successful boot of this mobo! Watching you ride the roller coaster of emotions repairing these SE/30s has gotten me to seriously consider refurbishing my Plus. Yeah, I know, it's pretty useless by modern standards, but it was our family's first computer (well, aside from the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A) and I spent literally hundreds of hours using it. It's the machine that got me hooked on computers in the first place. Until I packed it away in 1998, the only repair I ever had to do was touch up ONE cold solder joint on the sweep board, specifically the power connector that ran to the motherboard. A whopping 4 MB of RAM, and an aftermarket accelerator mod (MicroMac if memory serves me) that cranked that puppy up to what was impressive for the time, 16 MHz. I sure hope I remembered to remove the battery... It's been stored on its left side (sweep board down), so who knows what condition the insides are in right now. I'm almost afraid to look. But when I put it away it was still working as Apple intended (though a bit faster thanks to the mod).
adrian, watching your repair videos is such a delight in my day ^_^ - especially this series when you made a fault and do everything to resolve lets me remember one line of a famous (trashy) movie called "galaxy quest": "Never give up! Never surrender!" - thumbs up and keep up the great work!
There is nothing as satisfying as elaborately fixing your own mistake (the 12v to the 5v). Well done, you should be proud. Please clean those boards better.
Liquid flux! Adrian, cover all of the pins in liquid flux, run a soldering over all of them, like magic you will have a perfectly soldered SMD chip with no bridges. You can be as sloppy as you want, bridge all of the pins. Put liquid flux over all of them, BAM! Perfect solder job. Smokey but it works. This is how I learned in a Sony training class almost 30 years ago. Before hot air rework was thing.
It's funny that I started watching your classic Macs related videos while I was waiting my first classic Mac to arrive, the Macintosh SE model. I received it last Friday and stupid transport company managed to break the CRT while it was in transition. Damn. What a disappointment. Sadly, I can't do anything about it now. Glad this one is repaired though)
The whole series was extremely educational and entertaining, 2 words that you don't often see in a sentence. I hope your future videos will be just as good.
Hi Adrian, with the solder paste, make sure you keep it in the fridge when not being used. If it goes above about 10c it will not work as well and things like the bridges you're getting will happen. Good job on the technique! Cheers
Your technique looked much improved for the PLCC removal/reinstallation, glad you reported it seemed to be at least somewhat easier. You can, in fact, get away with _even less_ solder paste than you used - dragging a full line across the pads like you did was the right approach, but a thinner/narrower line of paste will give less opportunity for excess solder to bridge between adjacent contacts. When you're doing the "line of paste" method like that, consider that all the solder _between_ the pads will get sucked onto them, so you actually have more solder down than you think. It doesn't take much to properly attach the pins! If I'm getting too much paste out of my syringe and it's hard to control, I'll sometimes squirt a bit out onto some aluminum foil and then use a micro (usually slotted) screwdriver or a wooden/plastic pointed tool to transfer that onto the pads. This is a bit tedious for larger chips like you're doing, but gives much better control over exactly how much paste you lay down and where it goes. Sometimes the chips "float" into place, sometimes they don't; it depends on the chip size/weight and exact pin layout, but I try to avoid pressing down on the chip as this can squeeze solder out from below the pads into adjacent ones. Instead, if you need to adjust the position, just poke it gently from a side/corner without applying any downward pressure. If the chip is moving around too much from the hot air, turn the airflow down or adjust to a larger nozzle so the air velocity is lower. You might need to bump up the temperature a bit to compensate so that things melt quickly enough if you do this.
What an adventure. Man. Love that spider VRAM you have there. I'd clear epoxy that sucker for stability and use it if the board still fits in the case. Luckily this wasn't a customers' board.
As others have said, the messages from Editing Adrian are golden. At around 27:30 when you inserted a quiet "Oh, how wrong I am" I actually laughed out loud. Thanks for all the great videos. You've helped me on my journey to fix first, replace only when necessary. Thanks!
If it were me, I'd have just walked away weeks ago and left this motherboard as a lost cause. I guess Adrian doesn't have a lot of Quit in him. Which is part of why we're all so lucky to have him!
I don't have a freakin clue about computers, my last one was a Vic20 lol, but I love these videos, especially the black and white Adrian, like he's doing diagnostics on his diagnostic video!
@11:19 you even mentioned the possibility of a break in the TX side of the serial link, so I knew it was on your mind. 🙂 C'est la vie - still made for a great video!
Instead of using paste and heating the chip down with it loose, I'd solder two opposite legs by hand, then apply paste on the rest around the outside, and use hot air to heat. That way you can get the chip lined up perfectly in advance, then melt the paste and not have as much chance for the chip to move, even if the hand soldered legs re melt. OR, hand solder all of them, then add flux paste, and while pressing down, use hot air to re melt them all to wick the hand applied solder in well. Flux will make hand soldered pins flow and be shiny and really nice. Of course you can't clean the flux under the IC without bathing the board in alcohol or using ultrasonic cleaner bath.
Adrian, Though you did well with the repair. the Mac SE/20 can run without the FPU. All Mac II Series, including the SE/30 and the LC Series can run without the FPU as many such machines do not have an FPU. It is just that the machine will run slower and if you use a system made from "Build a System for THIS Machine" it will crash. If you have a generic System (Build a system disk for any machine) that it will run. Case in point - The Mac SE/30 vs Classic II, where the Classic II does not have an FPU but the SE/30 does. But if you can find (or build, as the guys on the M68KLA group made one) rare FPU Card for the Classic II, and you put in a FPU into the Classic II, speed wise, it becomes as fast (and in some cases faster) than the SE/30. Things Like Post Script and True Type Fonts uses the FPU to render the screen faster. Without the FPU it will render the screen slower. The FPU is not a "System Software Option" as is the OS absolutely needs it. The FPU is directly tied to the FPU and nothing else and any calls for complex math or the CPU to do gets thrown at the FPU to do. Thus if there was no FPU, the CPU would have to do that math on its own. To cheat on those systems that does not have a FPU, there is a program/System Extension called "Soft FPU" which emulates the FPU within the CPU. Yes, runs slow as heck, but it makes things easier for the CPU to handle.
I need to recap an SE/30. How best to check for shorts before I power the machine on? Trying to avoid a situation like the one you had. Thank you for an AMAZING video series! Especially all the information you found about the tech step and shared with the community!
Thanks. Thanks you did the mistake so we don't do that :). You might use some double-sided tape to put the caps higher and isolate them so. It is important to know that each step should be calculated correctly. Otherwise you will fall down to the rabbit hole. But the most important thing to learn is "Use your brain always". Troubleshooting electronics is about understanding how things are working. Great video and work. Hope I hade the opportunity to get bad boards to fix. But that is not always easy.
"SE repair series" More like SE breaking series :D Nah, just kidding. I love these. You're HW debugging skills always amaze me. Keep making great videos!
Well, if anything, it is a good lesson in remembering to triple-check your work before applying any power, just to be sure there's no shorts or unwanted crossed wires blowing out a load of parts in the process... :)
something I'd never thought I'd hear on Adrian's Digital Basement, "hence the f_ _ _ smell." I was doing something else and must have missed that part before. I was like, "what?" heheheh
It's a shame you said this series didn't do as well as some of your other videos, Adrian. These lengthy sagas of in-depth troubleshooting are some of my favorite content of yours! I'll keep donating if you keep making them, views be damned. 😉
I have to agree that I seriously love these videos and I also appreciate the amount of work that goes into making them.
I don't even own an Apple, and I love this series for the evidence based approach to repair.
For me, it felt like a lot of copy/paste from a spreadsheet and reciting of hex numbers. Useful if I wanted a tutorial, but less appealing as entertainment. A difficult line to walk. Can't please all of the people all of the time. Still a happy subscriber!
I also love this style of series!
Maybe when the entire series is finished people people will be more lilely to watch since the series can be binge watched?
Not much nostalgia outside of the USA , they could not compete with cheap Euro/Asian PC's, here a apple was for work not play.
I love the black and white future edits. I just keep thinking in my head of the meme, "It was at this moment that he knew, he f*cked up".
Hahahaha yeah!!! 🤣 Exactly!
I was thinking the same thing.
I was getting Dukes of Hazzard freeze frame vibes ("Bet those Duke boys wish they had a parachute about now!"), but then again je suis un homme d'un certain âge. I like the new meme a lot.
The edits at least help me not scream into the screen "nooo you forgot to check the TX" ;)
Ok, I want to make it loud and clear that I LOVE long, detailed “ride along” trouble-shooting g videos! I’m 70 and I spent my entire career troubleshooting electrica, electronic, and computer problems. I synch right up to Adrian’s critical thinking methodologies, and I ALWAYS learn something new on every video, whether it’s tools & techniques, or about a particular model of computer.
This series was great from the standpoint of “Don’t give up !” I’m very proud of you for that. I’m not very experienced with Macs. I did go through a period where a client had a number of older Macs interfaced to scientific instruments in a biotec laboratory. I was mostly supporting their LAN & Internet connections, but there was a bit of keeping the Macs happy and contented. There was an SE/30 sitting in the storeroom, retired, so I messed with it a bit. They probably would have given it to me, but I didn’t think I was interested in it at that point. Ah, for the lack of foresight!
Good job, Adrian! 💪
These videos are absolutely fantastic, because I have quite a few SE/30 motherboards that I need to fix and I've got renewed enthusiasm for tackling them again now.
That's awesome!! It's exactly why I make the videos, in hope they might be useful to other people.
Amazing work! This series was a delight to watch. Thanks!
Had to laugh at the zif adapter nest 😂 but it works!
The 8-bit guy: let's design and order adapter PCB
Usagi Electric: let's mill adapter PCB
Adrian: BODGE WIRE OCTOPUS!
Anyway, congratulation on the victory, and what a victory it was!
If it looks stupid but it works...
I thought the 8-Bit guy started with: Let me poke that with a paperclip.
@@NotIThe did, and the guy forgot Shelby from Tech Tangent
The best thing about this series is turning an otherwise big mistake (frying half the mobo with 12v) into all sorts of new learnings, not just for these boards, but also for anyone with an old Apple computer. Bravo sir.
27:33 - I hereby vote for more Gray Adrian! He's hilarious!
Totally agree 😂 very The Wonder Years esque, love it!
Gradrian the Narrator
I have next to no interest in apple pc's but enjoy watching the techniques and repair philosophy you follow.
Thanks Adrian.
You deserve more views.
Thanks -- I do try to show that the techniques are the same no matter what the system is. :-)
Same here, The Amiga was my home computer for a long time and would never give Apple house room , but I've done so much fault diagnosis on all sorts of equipment, mainly on Radar and Sonar equipment and custom CPU systems Z80, 8085 etc . that I can see most of the techniques I was taught being used here. Very well done, and it's a wonderful learning tool for any engineer to work through.
Andy
I feel the same. I watch for the sheer enjoyment of seeing an old machine come back to life. But I would NOT ever want to use that old thing. So I am glad that Adrian is doing all the work and I don't have to. And I don't have to figure out what to do with the old machine afterwards either.
Same here
This has to be in the top tier of retro repairs on the internet (not just TH-cam!)
I'm so glad you got it working, but really the journey of discovery with this series has just been amazing, thanks for taking us all along for the ride!
Adrian this is one of the best series I've seen from you it was so interesting to see how you fixed so many problems and slowly diagnosing everything piece by piece Good job
I only used computers, never repaired one on this level, i have no solder skills, i never used an oscilloscope.
And still here i am watching these videos and been fascinated about them.
Welcome to the club!
Adrian's videos are wierdly satisfying, I think it's his soothing personality as much as his incredible skill.
This was a great series!! I hope it does better and your views increase.
This was great to watch and since I have been subbed to your channel it’s always been fun to watch your troubleshooting abilities.
Cheers!!
Chiming in about the plcc soldering again. Solder paste is not the best rework technique, I stopped doing that long ago. i recommend getting flux that louis Rossmann uses (that is no-clean and way better than rosin). Apply flux to all pads. Then apply new (leaded) tin to the pads. With that flux around the tin will apply evenly when going slow enough. Gnd pads sometimes require special attention. When the result looks even, apply more flux. Place the chip. If necessary tack doen on one or two legs with the iron.Then heat up the entire chip, its legs, and the surrounding pcb area. Go in circles. Your nozzle was way too small, use a larger one and enough airflow and heat (the trickiest part as the right amount of heat depends on board stack, practice level and heat gun - I use more flow and almost max heat to achieve the shortest possible process). You will see when the chip sinks down. Its worth practicing this on dead boards first. This also works with larger chips like qfp144. You do not get bridges this way and a more even result.
I was litterally thinking, "but you're going to check the receive line anyway right?" then you did your post commentary. lol
You don't need solder paste. You can clean the pads, tin them, then add flux and then sit the chip on top and heat it with hot air until it slides into place.
This is the way I've learned to solder those types to chips. It works well.
One addition: You can't hold the chip down while applying the hot air, or it won't slip into place. If the chip tries to fly away, the air flow is too high anyway.
I’ve totally done this before. Additionally the main problem Adrian had with the soldering job he did was with the lack of flux.
Hi Adrian, I've been watching this series very closely because I have an SE/30 that I haven't been able to repair after leaky caps and light battery damage. I was hoping to get the information I needed to diagnose and fix the board. I almost stopped watching when your repair fried that first board. Sometimes it's painful to watch you make mistakes, even though armchair technicians like myself make plenty of similar or more serious mistakes. I'm glad I kept watching because the information you shared including the reconstructed schematic and spreadsheet on serial port diagnostics is just what I needed. Knowing that others struggle to repair this era of macs and that it is possible to work through difficult failures makes me want to try again on my board. Thanks for sticking with this repair.
The part where you had a theory about the RAM and then tested it with a specific amount and it worked... blew my mind.
Never let Adrian near Data Line 31 ever again! 🤪 . Seriously though, good troubleshooting series!
On the 020 and up, you use those special F-line instructions to talk to the FPU/PMMU. If the copro isn’t present, the instruction acts like a trap, allowing the OS to jump into a replacement routine. Seeing as the SE/30 was never meant to operate without an FPU, it makes sense that they didn’t include a routine for that!
Very well done, sir. I’m not sure about everybody else, but I absolutely loved this series. I don’t even have an SE/30 but your thought process and explanation of everything you’re doing makes perfect sense and is much appreciated. My SE FDHD is working just fine but I will eventually need to recap.
I've never owned an apple product, probably never will. I did watch every second of this series though and I've never been so invested in seeing an Apple computer startup as with this "12v" machine of yours! I love the memory chip adaptor you made, if it performs exactly as it should I think you should leave it just for the visual effect on the board itself, its cool!!
Hats of to that dead 2cx for being an organ donor for pretty much everything! Might as well go back and pull the CPU to replace the one you used from your stash.
Great Series.... Thanks for sticking with it to the end......
Yesss, I love this series! Having refurbished an SE/30 of my own earlier this year, it's super interesting to see all the bullets that I dodged and the problems that I fortunately did not have to deal with. I also really appreciate the scientific approach to diagnosis, it's very educational and definitely will help to give me ideas when doing hardware repairs in the future.
1:12:09
Adrian: “Well, the board is fixed.”
The humble VRAM chip: “Omnissiah, grant me strength.”
That was a great series. Nice work Adrian.
As an SE/30 owner, I really appreciate your findings. They will be handy when my machine develops a fault.
Adventures on the 12 Volt Rail - sounds like an 80s movie! This is making me want to dig out my Mac II motherboard. No voltage adventures there. Just let it sit too long and the caps corroded it. Managed to get it to chime but no video. Probably my poor SMD repair skills.
Ah well you know you can bust out a serial cable and hopefully try to get some answers from it. It's like R2D2 talking to the Death Star computer :-)
@adriansdigitalbasement I'm no where near as smart as R2D2. It'd be more like Roomba talking to the Death Star lol. I'm digging through your videos now to find your technique for bodge wiring on these tiny traces. I've done it but I have a hard time avoiding other traces.
@@TechTimeTraveller I predict a pretty funny sketch!!!! R2D2 can come by and knock the Roomba out of the way and get real work done 😂
I really appreciate how you stuck with that seeming cursed board all the way through! Plus you gained a bunch of personal knowledge and helped expose Apple's advanced troubleshooting techniques for those machines.
I have to wonder if other OEMs had similar tools for any other machines. I did break/fix warranty repairs on laptops & PCs for almost 20 years from the late 90s to the mid 2010s for a bunch of different manufacturers. It always frustrated me how the PC OEMs completely discouraged component level diagnosing of issues in favor of the parts cannon approach for warranty work. While simultaneously penalizing techs for using too many parts.
This became especially true in the 2000s when all the major PC players changed how they viewed warranty repairs. The perception became warranty repairs were only a cost to their bottom line. Previously it was a value add to their customers and a good way to keep customers happy. They all figured it was cheaper to get new customers than keep existing ones (personal, small business & corporate alike) happy.
I love how the 70's towel still shows up without being needed to protect a CRT.
I ALWAYS love watching these type of videos. It's kind of relaxing and fun when I need to just sit and relax.
I absolutely loved the whole journey and learned a lot not only about macs, but electronics in general.
Thanks for the amazing learning, Adrian!
what a journey! your diagnostic have definitely leveled up. congratulations!
Ultimately the 12v-pocylpse made for a far more interesting repair series than the original repair would have been.
I’m so glad you pushed through with this one, it was very satisfying to see the board working.
I will likely watch them through a second time and I’m not even that interested in retro Macs.
I do appreciate learning about retro tech and how innovative they were at the time and the fact they are repairable in our currently disposable world.
My introduction to computers back when I was in high school when machines like Classics, Classic II’s & LC II’s arrived at school from Apple, seeing this SE/30 gave me joy. Your recapping error gave the vintage Macintosh community a new diagnostic tool so more vintage Macs will get fixed and loved again instead of becoming e-waste
Your persistence is admirable! Greetings from Münster in Germany :)
Congrats on the repair! What an in depth repair. I know I've learned from this series, I'm sure you learned a lot too!
It's quite fun watching Adrian diagnose and fix gnarly problems.
The fault finding is epic! Well done!
A trick I learned from northridgefix is to measure some power lines of good boards using the diode test mode on the multimeter. Noting the voltage drop, when you recap the board a short to a data line would likely give a different voltage drop on 12V indicating a problem.
Another trick when doing work on main boards is to use the flir camera and give a quick on/off power up/power down. If some parts shoot up in temperature you might be just in time to prevent permanent damage.
I salute you! Only a true troubleshooter would go to your lengths to get the macs working. And even more, you even got the debugger operating too.
That's what I love about you is how to diagnose and identify the problem and fix it. Nice job, buy the way. I love watching your long videos. Keep the wonderful working
Really one of the best repair videos!
Bravo! Nice job getting the video chip working using a Frankenstein mod of sorts. It doesn't have to look pretty so long as it works.
Kudos for saving this board and teaching us how to use the diagnostics
Hi Adrian. Solder paste is - essentially - eensie-tiny balls of solder in a rosin paste. It’s usually used with a mask; this is a thin sheet of etched steel or brass with holes where the pads go. You lay it onto the board, align it, then spread the solder paste onto it so the paste goes into the holes. You scrape it with the edge of something flat and straight, like the edge of a credit/debit card, or a small metal ruler, and this forces all the paste into the holes. Then you lift the mask and use hot air to solder the chip in place. Afterwards, you just clean the paste off the mask with IPA.
The simplest solution is to design a PCB with just pads that fit the (dead) PLCC chip, and have the traces extend out to the edge of the board (like the edge connector on an ISA-slot PC peripheral). Then send the design to JLCPCB, or PCBWay. They generally require a minimum order of 5 boards, but this is okay, as you can use them to practice using the solder paste and mask. Also, if you have a spare good chip, you can solder that to one of these boards and use it as a test jig! HTH! 😊
You could say I'm into it...I literally cheered when you got the video going last episode!
That's awesome. 🎉 It's so rewarding to get these old things working again.
I enjoy the amount of effort you put into repairing these items. Most world just trash and move on.
i LOVE that RAM contraption! you should save it and put it on display or something when you get a true replacement.
Amazing! Thank you. I always learn so much from your videos. The BEST channel on Apple II and Macintosh repair. I followed one of your Apple II repair videos and managed to fix Rev 0 Apple II.
Kudos for your tenacity, great deducing.
if the IC seems to not self align, You can try to push it very gently to see if they back to right position. Using lot of flux helps with self alignment and solder bridges
Good work on getting this board fixed. Experience is the harshest of teachers but the best at creating knowledge.
Have thoroughly enjoyed this series. Have great nostalgia for the old '030 as my first job was working on a bare-metal '030 workstation programmed via an in-circuit emulator which of itself was a marvellous piece of kit. Seeing the phrase 'f-line' pop up instantly triggered memories of Motorola terms for co-processor (any, not just the FPU, if memory serves) related gubbins.
Now all that’s needed is for someone to write a GUI app around those serial diagnostics to ease their use - or even emulate the original test device 😂
Thank you Adrian for this series, it has been very nice to follow along on your journey! Just one tidbit I have not heard you mention: there is another reason that ceramic capacitors are not a good idea to use and that is their capacitance is voltage dependent, I can't provide direct links due to TH-cam censorship but if you Google for this you will get some good articles: capacitance voltage dependency ceramic capacitors
I've talked about it before and it is something to consider. I've done a bunch of testing and this is mainly an issue with circuits using the caps for timing (RC, etc) as the values being off cause issues. But for bulk capacitance like what's happening here or AC filtering like on the audio circuit, it doesn't matter at all. As long as you check the datasheet to make sure you aren't getting 4uf when it should be 50uf.
Loved the video series, very interesting deep dive and a shining example of a data-driven diagnostic approach to repair!
This series of board repair was really interesting and I enjoyed watching it. Thank you - keep them coming!
Where is the 2 thumbs up for an epic series? Amazing saga of troubleshooting and new discoveries. Brilliant! May you get 100,000 high 5s. What can we get you to kill with voltage next?
I've watched each and every one of your SE/30 repair videos (not to mention older videos covering many Macintosh models), as I have a particular fondness for the Compact Macs. It usually took a LOT to kill them. We had two Mac labs at my high school and one PC lab with 486 DX/2s, one student tech (me) performing all the repair/maintenance for all the Macs in the building (including administration offices) while two student techs handled the PCs. I was responsible for roughly quadruple the number of machines, from Pluses up to LC 575s, and I had the least workload because the machines were so robust. My most common "call" was for floppy discs stuck in drives, and almost always the issue was students shoving discs in with bent metal slides. The second most common "call" was for OS issues, because some students would load the System Folder with all sorts of third-party stuff that would conflict with each other or slow the machine down to a crawl. Well, sure, 1 MB of RAM on a 7.88 MHz Mac Plus, plus The Grouch and Talking Moose INITs and After Dark Screensaver (I LOVED After Dark, More After Dark, and all the expansion packs), what did you expect? System 6.0.8 was delightfully stable, but there's only so far you can push those machines without RAM upgrades.
1:04 - In the auto repair field, that's called "firing the parts cannon." 😁
47:19 - I just cheered! First successful boot of this mobo!
Watching you ride the roller coaster of emotions repairing these SE/30s has gotten me to seriously consider refurbishing my Plus. Yeah, I know, it's pretty useless by modern standards, but it was our family's first computer (well, aside from the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A) and I spent literally hundreds of hours using it. It's the machine that got me hooked on computers in the first place. Until I packed it away in 1998, the only repair I ever had to do was touch up ONE cold solder joint on the sweep board, specifically the power connector that ran to the motherboard. A whopping 4 MB of RAM, and an aftermarket accelerator mod (MicroMac if memory serves me) that cranked that puppy up to what was impressive for the time, 16 MHz.
I sure hope I remembered to remove the battery... It's been stored on its left side (sweep board down), so who knows what condition the insides are in right now. I'm almost afraid to look. But when I put it away it was still working as Apple intended (though a bit faster thanks to the mod).
adrian, watching your repair videos is such a delight in my day ^_^ - especially this series when you made a fault and do everything to resolve lets me remember one line of a famous (trashy) movie called "galaxy quest": "Never give up! Never surrender!" - thumbs up and keep up the great work!
There is nothing as satisfying as elaborately fixing your own mistake (the 12v to the 5v). Well done, you should be proud. Please clean those boards better.
Hah love the B & W "Duke of Hazard" style narrator in-cuts of foreshadowing lol
thanks for showing how you lay out the foil that is really helpful
I was waiting to see what would come of this board. Glad to see it finally working. It was certainly a journey.
Liquid flux!
Adrian, cover all of the pins in liquid flux, run a soldering over all of them, like magic you will have a perfectly soldered SMD chip with no bridges.
You can be as sloppy as you want, bridge all of the pins. Put liquid flux over all of them, BAM! Perfect solder job. Smokey but it works.
This is how I learned in a Sony training class almost 30 years ago. Before hot air rework was thing.
It's funny that I started watching your classic Macs related videos while I was waiting my first classic Mac to arrive, the Macintosh SE model. I received it last Friday and stupid transport company managed to break the CRT while it was in transition. Damn. What a disappointment. Sadly, I can't do anything about it now. Glad this one is repaired though)
from some of the videos I have watched I think you on the right track, Yes the chip will move slightly when it solders
heck yeah! crystal quest! for the past few months you're videos have been inspiring me to fix my color classic and se's. i think it will happen soon.
The whole series was extremely educational and entertaining, 2 words that you don't often see in a sentence. I hope your future videos will be just as good.
Excellent series! I've not even owned a MAC ever. But I so enjoyed this anyway! Thank you!
I'm enjoying "Adrian's adventures on the 12-volt rail series"
"Oh how wrong I am" - I HAD to laugh out loud at that!
"It's alive", very apt Halloween theme (Frankenstein). 🧟
Hi Adrian, with the solder paste, make sure you keep it in the fridge when not being used. If it goes above about 10c it will not work as well and things like the bridges you're getting will happen. Good job on the technique! Cheers
Oh, I was hoping this old boy would be saved to play another day and you did it bro.
Your technique looked much improved for the PLCC removal/reinstallation, glad you reported it seemed to be at least somewhat easier. You can, in fact, get away with _even less_ solder paste than you used - dragging a full line across the pads like you did was the right approach, but a thinner/narrower line of paste will give less opportunity for excess solder to bridge between adjacent contacts. When you're doing the "line of paste" method like that, consider that all the solder _between_ the pads will get sucked onto them, so you actually have more solder down than you think. It doesn't take much to properly attach the pins!
If I'm getting too much paste out of my syringe and it's hard to control, I'll sometimes squirt a bit out onto some aluminum foil and then use a micro (usually slotted) screwdriver or a wooden/plastic pointed tool to transfer that onto the pads. This is a bit tedious for larger chips like you're doing, but gives much better control over exactly how much paste you lay down and where it goes.
Sometimes the chips "float" into place, sometimes they don't; it depends on the chip size/weight and exact pin layout, but I try to avoid pressing down on the chip as this can squeeze solder out from below the pads into adjacent ones. Instead, if you need to adjust the position, just poke it gently from a side/corner without applying any downward pressure. If the chip is moving around too much from the hot air, turn the airflow down or adjust to a larger nozzle so the air velocity is lower. You might need to bump up the temperature a bit to compensate so that things melt quickly enough if you do this.
What an adventure. Man. Love that spider VRAM you have there. I'd clear epoxy that sucker for stability and use it if the board still fits in the case. Luckily this wasn't a customers' board.
As others have said, the messages from Editing Adrian are golden. At around 27:30 when you inserted a quiet "Oh, how wrong I am" I actually laughed out loud. Thanks for all the great videos. You've helped me on my journey to fix first, replace only when necessary. Thanks!
I love seeing resolution of tough problems.
Great series! I think you should send 12V to data lines more often.
If it were me, I'd have just walked away weeks ago and left this motherboard as a lost cause. I guess Adrian doesn't have a lot of Quit in him. Which is part of why we're all so lucky to have him!
Adrian i suggesto to use flux while cleaning pads and to avoid bridges, then use less solder paste for those type of soldering.
yes, the chip needs to be basically floating atop the puddle of flux in order for it to be drawn to self-align to the solder pads
I don't have a freakin clue about computers, my last one was a Vic20 lol, but I love these videos, especially the black and white Adrian, like he's doing diagnostics on his diagnostic video!
I hope you move back to the plexus! :-)
Possibly your best series of videos to date, but you turn out such great content that I'm spoilt for choice.
man, from non-working doorstop to actually runs some program makes me mindblown.
@11:19 you even mentioned the possibility of a break in the TX side of the serial link, so I knew it was on your mind. 🙂 C'est la vie - still made for a great video!
Instead of using paste and heating the chip down with it loose, I'd solder two opposite legs by hand, then apply paste on the rest around the outside, and use hot air to heat. That way you can get the chip lined up perfectly in advance, then melt the paste and not have as much chance for the chip to move, even if the hand soldered legs re melt. OR, hand solder all of them, then add flux paste, and while pressing down, use hot air to re melt them all to wick the hand applied solder in well. Flux will make hand soldered pins flow and be shiny and really nice. Of course you can't clean the flux under the IC without bathing the board in alcohol or using ultrasonic cleaner bath.
A big hello from Spain Adrian, Great series Video on this repair 👏👏👏 you do really great 🎉🎉🎉
Oh I had totally forgotten about Crystal Quest. I played the heck out of that as a kid.
One thing you might not have discovered by the parts Canon approach was a broken trace for the serial
Adrian,
Though you did well with the repair. the Mac SE/20 can run without the FPU. All Mac II Series, including the SE/30 and the LC Series can run without the FPU as many such machines do not have an FPU. It is just that the machine will run slower and if you use a system made from "Build a System for THIS Machine" it will crash. If you have a generic System (Build a system disk for any machine) that it will run. Case in point - The Mac SE/30 vs Classic II, where the Classic II does not have an FPU but the SE/30 does. But if you can find (or build, as the guys on the M68KLA group made one) rare FPU Card for the Classic II, and you put in a FPU into the Classic II, speed wise, it becomes as fast (and in some cases faster) than the SE/30.
Things Like Post Script and True Type Fonts uses the FPU to render the screen faster. Without the FPU it will render the screen slower.
The FPU is not a "System Software Option" as is the OS absolutely needs it. The FPU is directly tied to the FPU and nothing else and any calls for complex math or the CPU to do gets thrown at the FPU to do. Thus if there was no FPU, the CPU would have to do that math on its own.
To cheat on those systems that does not have a FPU, there is a program/System Extension called "Soft FPU" which emulates the FPU within the CPU. Yes, runs slow as heck, but it makes things easier for the CPU to handle.
Awsome job Adrian keep up the good work😊
Yep, F-line or Line-F is the name of the communication protocol between m68k CPUs and FPUs.
I need to recap an SE/30. How best to check for shorts before I power the machine on? Trying to avoid a situation like the one you had.
Thank you for an AMAZING video series! Especially all the information you found about the tech step and shared with the community!
10:10 That wasn't a little adventure, it was a "High Adventure" 🙂
Thanks. Thanks you did the mistake so we don't do that :). You might use some double-sided tape to put the caps higher and isolate them so. It is important to know that each step should be calculated correctly. Otherwise you will fall down to the rabbit hole.
But the most important thing to learn is "Use your brain always". Troubleshooting electronics is about understanding how things are working.
Great video and work. Hope I hade the opportunity to get bad boards to fix. But that is not always easy.
SE/30 owner here, VERY much appreciated series. I feel I know a ton more about the SE/30 now.
"SE repair series" More like SE breaking series :D Nah, just kidding. I love these. You're HW debugging skills always amaze me. Keep making great videos!
Well, if anything, it is a good lesson in remembering to triple-check your work before applying any power, just to be sure there's no shorts or unwanted crossed wires blowing out a load of parts in the process... :)
Yay! Loved the SE series. TY
something I'd never thought I'd hear on Adrian's Digital Basement, "hence the f_ _ _ smell." I was doing something else and must have missed that part before. I was like, "what?" heheheh