A bit of a continuation from the post yesterday. Today I received a package tools required for the re-balling of BGA chips. First up is a jig for 90mm stencils. Seems of quite high quality, will be interesting to see how well it works. Although, I think skill will probably be the more deciding factor with regard to that.

Just a quick post to document that I have ordered an IR8500 BGA Rework station. I have always wanted to learn how to use one of these machines and now I have a bigger work area I finally have room for one. Reviews seem good for this particular one, I was considering lashing out and getting a hot air based one but upon thinking about it I ended up going for an IR station instead. I don't really want this sort of work to be the main part of what I do so I think spending more might be a bit of a waste

Repair time: PS2 90002 with no video output. AV port was in poor shape with visible rust of the outer shielding so even though there was continuity from the av cable to the mainboard I opted to replace the port. Next it was time to move onto the main problem. I first started by probing around the video encoder with the oscilloscope. Data lines from the pixel bus going into the encoder were all nice and busy, so I assumed it was the encoder and replaced it from a donor. However, this did not fix the problem. In hindsight I jumped the gun a bit. Good news is this eliminated the encoder as the cause Using the SCPH-7000x manual as a reference for the video encoder circuit (encoder IC on the 90000 has the same pinouts) I went through again with the scope and tested everything more thoroughly. I then found that clock signal (highlighted in purple in second picture) was missing Tracing this signal back through the board I came to a resistor of which had significant corrosion around it. Tested continuity on both sides and found one side was broken Repaired broken trace (first picture), now console is fully working

Xbox 360 S repair that I did recently. Console was turning on; fans were immediately going to 100% and was red dotting. Upon obtaining the secondary error code of 0012 I went to the Xbox 360 repair wiki on consolemods.org and found that one of the causes for this was failed thermal diode resistors related to the GPU. Checked the resistors which were R4D5 and R4D6. They are both meant to be zero ohms but R4D5 was measuring about 11 ohms. Replaced resistor and now console boots fine. This is quite the common problem with these, but nonetheless I thought I would make a post about it anyway.

Another one of these cheap Highspeedido Internal HDMI solution, this time for the Wii. Performance on this one is exceptional since the Wii outputs 480p natively so there is no deinterlacer involved. Install on these is slightly simpler than the other solutions out there such as the Electron Shepherd AVE-HDMI and the Arthrimus Wii boards. 

Received and installed the new Highspeedido HDMI mod a few days ago. Install was very easy, and quality is amazing considering the price. OSD menu is lacking but what can you expect for less than $80AUD. I've done all of the digital-to-digital console solutions from this lot except the ps2 phat. All are very good budget solutions for adding HDMI to retro consoles

Just fresh from installing the HDMI kit for the Dreamcast, the same group releases another kit, this time for the PS2 Slim. I already have a Retro Gem installed in my personal PS2, but I am certainly going to put aside a console and give one of these a whirl. Only thing I can see just from my brief glance at the product page on Ali is it does not have 5.1 audio, which does not worry me but maybe might be enough for some people to give it a pass. Still, $80AUD compared to over $300AUD for the Retro gem once you factor in shipping it will be interesting to see how it performs. It won't be as feature rich of course, but I honestly have not used many of the features available on the Retro Gem, so this may be a very good alternative for those that don't want to spend the money or are on a budget.

It seems that a missed this late last year, but apparently Noctua have released a new 60mm fan. This is significant because it will fit in the FAT ps2s without having to 3d print a whole new back panel, you instead just need to print a mount for inside the case. I have personally never been a fan(no pun intended) of fan mods in general. But if I was to consider one, this would be on the radar for sure