++ ATOT official NEF thread part IV ++

[sdifox]

2.40 (tax included) Whopper devoured. It's the King Deal of the day.

 

[rudeguy]

ruh roh

Owner wants to have a sit down.


Cover for me!

 

[rudeguy]

ruh roh

Owner wants to have a sit down.


Cover for me!

 

[sdifox]

ruh roh

Owner wants to have a sit down.


Cover for me!

About that, I am gonna need you to come in on Saturday.

 

[IronWing]

Flipper is like George Zimmerman on roid rage. Flipper should be banned.

 

[sdifox]

Actually, I am going to need you to come in on Sunday too.

 

[fjmeat]

chicken and green beans

 

[Barfo]

spoiler: Ironwing doesn't actually have wings

 

[fjmeat]

chicken and green beans

 

[IronWing]

spoiler: Ironwing doesn't actually have wings

Oh contraire. This is the original Ironwing.

Ironwing the Bell Maker

 

[fjmeat]

 

[fjmeat]

 

[SaDiZTiKStyLeZ]

http://www.youtube.com/user/Just4TheFunkOfIt

 

[MontyAC]

 

[rudeguy]

his door is closed now...I'm safe for a little bit

 

[rudeguy]

Waiting for the bottom number to be 130. In the meantime my area gets up to about 200F and stinky.

 

[sdifox]

He is just lubing up :whiste:

 

[rudeguy]

reflow accomplished

I think....

Now to let things cool off and see if it worked.

 

[sdifox]

reflow accomplished

I think....

Now to let things cool off and see if it worked.

Let the sparks fly!

 

[rudeguy]

Let the sparks fly!

this can only go one of two ways:

I'm brilliant! And they throw lots of money at me.

I'm a moron! And they kick me out.


Lets hope they don't find out the truth...

 

[sdifox]

ahhahahahahha

 

[sdifox]

narf

 

[rudeguy]

 

[sdifox]

so, sparks?

 

[rudeguy]

so, sparks?

no sparks

But talking...er...typing things out helps me think.

The credit card terminals I work on have a memory issue. Some of them won't take or hold the programming we put on them. They have 2 memory chips, SRAM and flash. I believe the flash chip is good because the programming does go into the machine. However it reboots after install and this is when the programming goes away. But then there are other machines that just won't go into programming mode at all.

I was able to inspect one of the boards of a machine with the problem. There were obvious BGA flaws. I tried reflowing it to see if that would fix it without replacing the SRAM chip but that did not work. So I have a few directions I can go:

1) replace the internal battery. I tried this without reflowing and it did not work. Maybe the combination will fix it?

2) Replace the SRAM chip entirely. This is probably what will happen, but then I am unsure if I will need to somehow program that chip to get it to work.

3) Take a known working terminal and swap the SRAM chip from that into a terminal that is having the issues. This is the one I want to test the most but without solder balls I can't do this.

But then what if I do all of that and the issue persists? Move on to the flash chip? I really don't think it could be the flash chip. I need it to be the SRAM chip because we also need to upgrade the memory on a lot of machines and if we are already replacing SRAM chips, the memory upgrade would be a matter of pennies.

There are no blown caps. No broken traces that I can see. I can't find a single thing wrong with these boards. It has to be an SRAM issue.

....I think