Tag: soldering

DIY Chip Quik style desoldering alloy (#P37)

And finally closure on the fake China solder wire topic back from WHL #68 / WHL #68F1. I bought a bunch of Bismuth metal in early June (1KG Bismuth Metal Ingot 99.99% Pure Crystal Fr Making Crystals/Fishing Lures – 20.03€ including shipping, before the “no more VAT free imports” EU legislation went into effect) and with the high lead content solder from the other review, I should be able to make some low-melting point solder.

First of all, the Bismuth was delivered in a big chunk as advertised, which I did not expect. They are somehow able to split that crystallized cake precisely into pieces of slightly below 1kg and then add in small bits to make exactly 1000g (at 2 cents a gram, they clearly do not give away free stuff). […]

22nd August 2021 23rd August 2021 By Bzzz In No Comment

JMB363 2 Port PCI-E SATA II 2.0 RAID & 1 IDE 3.5″ to PCI Express Adapter Converter Card Expresscard (WHL #67)

Time-incorrect retro computing time! We’ve had a lot of computer-related stuff recently, but this one is an elegant mix of old, niche and Wan Hung Lo. It’s perfect.

First of all, what is it? It’s a PCI Express 1.0 x1 card with (according to Wikipedia) the only native PCIe to PATA and SATA interface chip there is, a JMicron JMB363. The “confidential” three-page datasheet floats around on the interwebs if you want to take a look. PCIe 1.0, AHCI and IDE compatible, HotPlug, NCQ, UDMA6 = ATA133 (1 port, so 2 devices), SATA2 (3 Gb/s and 2 ports, so 2 devices as well), RAID 0/1/0+1/JBOD functionality. […]

13th June 2021 14th June 2021 By Bzzz In No Comment

USB 2.0 4-Port Aluminum Hubs … and Chinese manual labour (WHL #20)

Hey :)

For today’s blog post I have something that I found at work yesterday. It’s a plain old USB 2.0 hub in an aluminium case, which is used inside of our measuring equipment. Just a jellybean part, it’s sold as Logilink here but I bet other brands just slap on a different logo on the front and they’re good to go. We chose this because it is relatively small, has all USB jacks flat in line (the smaller ones have 2×2 configuration or tend to stack them), and can make use of external power supplies, rather than sucking too much from the uplink port. […]

18th March 2017 27th June 2017 By Bzzz In No Comment