[Jack Gassett] is developing a new breakout board for an FPGA. The chip comes in a ball grid array (BGA) package which is notoriously difficult to solder reliably. Since he’s still in development, the test boards are being assembled in his basement. Of the first lot of four boards, only one is functional. So he’s setting out to rework the bad boards and we came along for the ride.

To reflow the surface mount components he picked up a cheap pancake griddle. The first thing [Jack] does is to heat up the board for about two minutes, then pluck off the FPGA and the FTDI chips using a vacuum tweezers. Next, the board gets a good cleaning with the help of a flux pen, some solder wick, and a regular soldering iron. Once clean, he hits the pads with solder paste from a syringe and begins the soldering process. BGA packages and the solder paste itself usually have manufacturer recommended time and temperature guidelines. [Jack] is following these profiles using the griddle’s temperature controller knob and the timer on an Android phone. In the video after the break you can see that he adjusts the timing based on gut reaction to what is going on with the solder. After cleaning up some solder bridges on the FTDI chip he tested it again and it works!

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The original PSP may be old news but there is an interesting relic of a website (translated) dedicated to the reverse engineering of a PSP (and exploring Saturn?). To determine the true capabilities of the PSP they desoldered most of the ball grid array chips and then hand soldered 157 jumper wires to allow for direct memory access. In later pictures it shows the PSP hooked up to external hardware for on the fly memory modification. Unfortunately the details are sparse and it doesn’t appear as if they will be updated anytime soon because the website has been “deleted and freezed because of spam. may ineffaceable curse prevail on the spammers.” Still this doesn’t detract too much some very impressive soldering.

[Nirvous] managed to get composite video out working on the DIDJ. He knew that the CPU had the ability to generate the signal, and that similar devices already had this capability. After studying some DIDJ teardowns he figured out which connection on the processor should provide the appropriate signal. Next was the firmware side of things and after sifting through a lot of code he was pleased to find a flag that looked like it would enable video out. Some cross-compiling, soldering, and a low-pass filter got it to work.

If you’ve been hacking around on the device you might try this. The CPU uses a ball grid array so soldering is a bit difficult. We covered a BGA soldering trick that might be just the thing so check it out before you retreat into your soldering-fortress of solitude.

[Philip] developed a method of tracking down the pins of a Ball Grid Array. He wanted to do so in order to add USB host functionality to his HP Jordan 720. The method doesn’t directly connect to the BGA but instead finds a via or other access point to serve as a solder point. He first looks up the pin in the BGA datasheet. Once located, he uses the bristle of a toothbrush (teal) to act as a backstop and feeds in some enameled wire (brown) to the appropriate ball. A multimeter is used to check connectivity between the wire and the vias around the chip.

Patience young grasshopper, this should work but it might take a while.

Joystiq has been tracking the new starlet of Xbox 360 failures: the E74 error. It appears as the lower right light on the console turning red and an on-screen message telling the user to contact support with the error E74. The number of reported E74 errors seems to have risen since August 2008 and people are wondering if the more recent increase in errors are related to the release of the New Xbox Experience (NXE) Dashboard update. Did Microsoft reclass Red Ring of Death (RROD) failures as E74 to avoid warranty replacements? Read the rest of this entry »