Tiny C2N Monitor: How I go about soldering SMD components

Here’s a few pictures of the method and order in which I solder SMD components on the Tiny C2N Monitor board. Hopefully these will be of some help to those interested in acquiring a DIY kit!

Happy soldering!

IECHost: maintenance release of the GUI client

Hopefully I’ve replied to all those who were waiting for some sort of feedback from me. In the next few days, unless my work day is already heavy enough, I shall complete a few maintenance tasks for the IECHost GUI client. These are along the lines of creating wrapper functions to avoid some code duplication and of moving some code to separate modules, logically grouped.
There’s probably some deal of documentation I shall be updating as a consequence of some of the changes I have in mind, especially around how inaccessible tracks are going to be treated in future.

Stay tuned!

IECHost: new issues logged in its issue tracker

Those who have been following the recent activity within the IECHost issue tracker, might have noticed that I logged, among the others, two new issues: 786986 and 786987.

These issues are both related to a somewhat unusual scenario, the one for which a disk has tracks written to the outermost edge by a misaligned drive, not accessible by a stock drive. Mads, from the disk transfer team, provided a few more of such disks during X’2018, so I’ve been able to do more testing.

For the time being, if you come across a disk with unreachable tracks, just set the “Max error” count to the very minimum value (i.e. 1). If you have 2 or more errors in the reachable area of the disk, no retry will be attempted, so you can avoid deadlocks in the ROM code of the drive.

I will work at these issues in the next few weeks, so that I can improve user experience significantly when dealing with the above mentioned, unusual, scenario.

Stay tuned!

A few more DC2N4-LC devices ready to ship

There are now 6 DC2N4-LC devices available for shipping.

DC2N4-LC: latest batch assembled and ready to ship

Busy but getting there

To those who have been waiting for feedback or for a reply from myself for a while: please rest assured I will get in touch soon. I am just settling back in my routine after X and coping with a somewhat busy time at work 🙂

I will also soon publish my notes for IECHost from X, based on the experience I had by spending time with the disk transfer team.

At the same time, today I shipped the 5th DC2N4-LC from the current batch. I shall be building 5 more devices in the coming days.

Stay tuned!

IECHost GUI client version 3.1 released

Version 3.0 of the IECHost GUI client is now available within my Software page.

IECHost GUI client 3.1 generally available

Tiny C2N Monitor: might ship as fully built device

As I understand users might not be comfortable with soldering together Tiny C2N Monitor kits, I might offer fully built devices as an option.

Here’s what the device looks like once soldered together:

Tiny C2N Monitor, version 1.2 fully assembled

I’d hate to go into the full details of how long it takes to assemble one, what the hourly pay rate should be, and what extra costs are involved.

Therefore, I am asking for feedback from readers: what do you thing a reasonable markup price would be?
Leave your comments!