Collaborate Disseminate
If you want to build cool things these days, you’ve probably had to master surface mount electronics. However, for many people, ball grid array (BGA) is still intimidating. Have a look at [VoltLog’s] video about his techniques for soldering BGA …read more
If you’ve ever wanted to try your hand at creating a Raspberry Pi-like board for yourself, you should check out [Jay Carlson’s] review of 10 different Linux-capable SoCs. Back in the 1960s, a computer was multiple refrigerator-sized boxes with thousands of interconnections and building one from scratch was only a …read more
Continue reading Thinking about Creating a Raspberry Pi Replacement?
If you’re developing a performant IP-KVM based on the Raspberry Pi, an HDMI capture device that plugs into the board’s CSI port would certainly be pretty high on your list of dream peripherals. Turns out such boards actually exist, and somewhat surprisingly, are being sold for reasonable prices. Unfortunately the …read more
Continue reading Incredible Soldering in the Name of Hardware Support
Amateur radio operators have always been at the top of their game when they’ve been hacking radios. A ham license gives you permission to open up a radio and modify it, or even to build a radio from scratch. True, as technology has advanced the opportunities for old school radio …read more
Continue reading High-End Ham Radio Gives Up Its Firmware Secrets
On some 2011 Macbook Pro models, there is a tendency for the Radeon GPU to fail. This should mean game over for the computer, but surprisingly salvation is offered by its having not one but two GPUs on board. The Intel processor also has a GPU, and Apple use a …read more
Continue reading A Dead Macbook GPU Shouldn’t Stop You, With This BGA Soldering Hack
Surface mount devices can take some adjusting to for hackers primarily used to working with through-hole components. Despite this, the lure of the hottest new parts has enticed even the most reticent to learn to work with the technology. Of course, time rolls on and BGA parts bring further difficulties. …read more
Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams are back after last week’s holiday break to track down all of the hacks you missed. There are some doozies; a selfie-drone controlled by your body position, a Theremin that sings better than you can, how about a BGA hand-soldering project whose creator …read more
Most Hackaday readers will be a pretty dab hand with a soldering iron. We can assemble surface-mount boards, SOICs and TSSOPs are a doddle, 0402s we take in our stride, and we laugh in the face of 0201s. But a Twitter thread from [Greg Davill] will probably leave all but …read more
Continue reading BGA Hand Soldering Uses Tombstone Resistor Technique, Demands Surgical Precision
You may have heard the phrase “flip-chip” before: it’s a broad term referring to several integrated circuit packaging methods, the common thread being that the semiconductor die is flipped upside down so the active surface is closest to the PCB. As opposed to the more traditional method in which the …read more
Continue reading Flip Chips and Sunken Ships: Packaging Trick for Faster, Smaller Semiconductors
It’s said that the electronic devices we use on a daily basis, particularly cell phones, could be so much smaller than they are if only the humans they’re designed for weren’t so darn big and clumsy. That’s only part of the story — battery technology has a lot to do with overall device size — but it’s true that chips can be made a whole lot smaller than they are currently, and are starting to bump into the limit of being able to handle them without mechanical assistance.
Or perhaps not, if [mitxela]’s hand-soldering of a tiny ball-grid array chip …read more
Continue reading No Caffeine, No Problem: A Hand-Soldered Chip-Scale Package