Now that my pan is ready, it is time to do this. First I needed a board. I got one of my designs prototyped by Batch PCB who are cheap and did a good job but I had to wait about six weeks which is OK for hobbyists but I wouldn’t want to be in a hurry.

This solder paste stuff is pretty toxic. Perhaps I’m going overboard here but I thought some rubber gloves would be a good idea.


To apply the paste, I just squirted it on the board. It kinda went everywhere at first until I got the hang of it. Next time I’ll get a smaller tube and perhaps a smaller nozzle. I fixed it up as best I could using a toothpick and cotton tips. It took quite a lot longer and was much more messy than I anticipated.


Next comes the pick-and-place. I got most of my parts from Digi-key who send them out as “Cut tape” which is pretty convenient, you just peel the backing off the tape until you get the quantity of parts you need and the rest are left still attached to the tape so you don’t lose them in the carpet. I positioned the parts with tweezers since most of them are incredibly teeny.

My board includes both surface-mount and through-hole components. I just placed the SMT stuff at this stage because I need the back of the board to be flat for heat transfer.

Now for the fun bit. I put the loaded board onto the pan cold. Then I increased temperature to around 100°C. I left it at that heat for a minute to get everything nice and warm. Then I cranked up the heat to maximum (in my case, 175°) until the solder melted. It was magic to watch. Everything just blobbed into place. Even components which were not exactly positioned right pulled themselves into line.

After a slow cool-down over 5 minutes, I examined the board. Everything looks good to my eye except for some pretty major bridging between the pins of my ARM chip. I’ll leave dealing with these to part 3.

In the end though, I’m pretty pleased with the result. Not bad for my first try!

I’ve been dying to have a go at this ever since I read some hobbyist websites on how to do solder reflow at home. I never even thought this was possible to do on a hobbyist budget.

The idea is to use a frying pan or toaster oven to perform solder reflow for SMT circuit boards. I decided to use a skillet thinking that a toaster oven would melt components since it heats both top and bottom.

I managed to find the perfect thing. A pre-owned 9″ electric skillet from the Salvation Army shop for $3.

Believe it or not, this device is not a precision instrument. The temperature dial is simply numbered from 1 to 10. The first thing I need to do is get some idea of what actual temperature this thing gets to.


So I need to do a scientific experiment. Firstly I put some oil in the pan and stuck in a thermometer (the fork is to hold the probe in the oil). Then I turned up the heat slowly making a note of the temperature. Finally I graphed the result. Here are the results in degrees C. That cheap little temperature knob is surprisingly linear.

1. Element not energized
2. 30°
3. 46°
4. 65°
5. 90°
6. 105°
7. 125°
8. 140°
9. >150°
10. >150°

The last two entries I could not measure since the thermometer only went up to 150°C, but by extrapolation I get 155° and 175°. Yes I did this on paper, it is much quicker than using Excel!

I am now ready to use this thing for solder reflow.

Warcraft II – Tides of Darkness. I used to love this old DOS game way back when. But now I want to run it on Windows XP. Yes, it is possible. Here’s how.

DOS Emulation

First you need the very excellent DOSBOX which is a DOS emulator. You can download it from http://www.dosbox.com/.

Once DOSBOX is installed, we need somewhere to put our DOS games. I created a folder called C:\DOSGAMES for this purpose.


Now it is time to run DOSBOX. Once it is going, type the following two commands:

mount c C:\DOSGAMES\

mount d D:\ -t cdrom

NOTE: If your CD-ROM drive is not D:\, modify this accordingly.

Then you can insert your Warcraft II CD. The game can be installed like so:

D:

SETUP

Just select all the default options except for the soundcard and music device which you should set to Soundblaster 16.

Making an icon

At this point you can run the game by typing WAR2. But I don’t want to stop there. Let’s now make a pretty icon so you can launch the game with a mouse-click.

Open the folder C:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.72 and find the file dosbox.conf. Copy it to your C:\DOSGAMES\WAR2 folder.

Edit the copy of dosbox.conf and add the following line to the bottom under the [autoexec] section:

mount d D:\ -t cdrom

I’ve found it is also a good idea to reduce the speed of CPU emulation otherwise the map can scroll too fast. Modify the cycles entry in dosbox.conf like so:

cycles=20000

Now save the changes you made to dosbox.conf.

Copy the DOSBOX icon on your desktop. Rename the copy to “Warcraft II”. Now right-click on the icon and select Properties.

Enter the following text (all on one line) into the Target box:

 "C:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.72\dosbox.exe" "C:\DOSGAMES\WAR2\WAR2.EXE"
-conf "C:\DOSGAMES\WAR2\dosbox.conf" -exit -fullscreen

Then finally click on the Change Icon button.

Click Browse and navigate to the folder C:\DOSGAMES\WAR2. Double-click the file WAR2ICON.DLL.

Choose the WarCraft icon and then click OK. Click OK on the shortcut properties window also.

Now we are done. Click the WarCraft icon and enjoy!

Hey, Multicomp runs pretty good under Ubuntu using WINE!

I’ve been using the excellent Wordpress blogging software for a year and a half now and it has been good – except for the comment spam. By the end of 2007 I was getting more than 100 comment spams every day and I was mighty tired of manually deleting them.

Then I found SpamBam by Gareth Hayes. I’ve been running it for two months now and in that time I have received no spam. None. Not a single one.

If that isn’t the best anti-spam plugin ever, I’ll eat my hard drive.

I finally got rid of that unreliable NetGear Wireless card and replaced it with a TP-Link card which uses the Atheros chipset. It was only $27 at UMart.

I’ve only had it for a couple of days but in that time I have transferred more than 10GB through it and it has been 100% reliable.

This one was not too difficult to get going on Ubuntu since it is well supported by the MadWifi drivers which are built in to Ubuntu.


However there is a little catch if you want to use WEP. You need to add the iwpriv command to activate your WEP. Here’s my /etc/network/interfaces file with the tricky bit highlighted in bold:

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# TP-Link Wi-fi card
auto ath0
iface ath0 inet dhcp
        wireless-mode Managed
        wireless-essid adamnet
        pre-up iwpriv ath0 authmode 2
        wireless-key 1234567890

NOTES: If you are copying this, make sure to change the essid and key to match those of your own network. And if you think this is my real WEP key, you are in for some disappointment.