Crazy Solder Jobs

Sometimes you have a board, and that board works well, for what it was designed to do, except now you need to do something else. Not only would designing and building new boards be too expensive (some of the boards I've modified were $50K and up), but it simply would take too long to get the job done. After all when the customers are clamoring for data in a week, and it would take at least three weeks to re-spin the boards, and $$$$ (millions) are on the line, there is little choice but to "make it work". That's what I do.

Custom 1

Custom termination. 40 differential pairs all terminated with a 10 pF cap to ground. Blech, that's 80 components hand soldered into place. And they're dinky ass 0402's!

Custom 1

100 ohm 0402 resistor across a balenced signal pair, with 2 0402 10pF caps terminating each signal to ground

Custom 2

Here are three shots of a custom signal termination I did to debug a communications circuit.
Something to bear in mind is that the smaller resistors (blue) are 0402 size. This is the size of the LPC resistors on the Xbox. In other words they're damn small!

Custom 2 (1)

Custom 2 (2)

Custom 2 (3)

Custom 3

reeze to solder compared to the 0402's) the challenge here was that affixed to the apex of the teepe I had to connect a through hole capacitor. As you can see the resistors are dwarfed by the lead for the cap. This turned out to be a really big assed pain.

Custom 3 (1)

Custom 3 (2)

Custom 3 (3)