Upon close inspection, the panel board suffered enough moisture damage to decide to scrap the board and create a new one. It’s not a complex board at all, thankfully.
I started by removing all the switches so all the traces could be reviewed.
During this process it became obvious that most switches have snuffed it as well, as the pins, mostly on the leds, are rotten through or even non existent in some cases.
No worries, a quick order at Aliexpress and fresh switches are enroute. For certain ones, like the blue ones, I have enough in storage from the Zyklus clones. I want to see if I can refurbish the old switches, as to keep everything as original as I can and the original ITT’s are better quality. We’ll see.
A couple of dozen pictures later, I asked our user PaulMC if he could redraw the board in KiCad so I can have JLCPCB print up a fresh one. This also gives the opportunity to include two jumper wires into the PCB design, and there are a few resistors installed vertically that can now be installed flat.
A little back and forth with Paul between design and checking the actual board for hole positions and sizing.
I also want to use proper connectors for the wiring. Right now, the wire-trees are soldered directly to very short header pins and when I was desoldering them, I noticed a few had come undone already. Creating new internal wiring will require a bit of planning and designing, so that seems a nice rainy afternoon job as well.
So for now the todo list is as follows:
– Draw out the wiring.
– replace all the tants on the mainboard with fresh ones.
– Continue inventory all the IC’s in google sheet and note which ones are not yet on feet.
– Once that is done, order enough high quality (turned) IC feet so they can all will be easily replaceable.
– Pull out and inspect the power supply parts. This will be a project on its own.
Based on the sources I have, I started writing a new bootstrapper EPROM with only diagnostics in it. It should perform a test of all LEDs, the 3 character display, sound (speaker) and internally obviously the CPU, the DUARTS and maybe a memory test.