Little Guys 8: This one won't fly [EK3 Media Engine]

Comments · 735

• CA

  @CathodeRayDude · 2 years ago (edited) · pinned

  Update: An eagle eyed viewer (thanks @SwitchingPower!) noticed something I missed: the component on the backside of the board underneath the CPU is toast. You can see that around <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHukN0JsMpo&amp;t=1280">21:20</a>, directly in the middle of the socket on the back. I&apos;d noticed the dirt on it resembled the spatter from a blown semiconductor during disassembly, but I wiped it off and it seemed like it was just the same deposits I saw elsewhere in the thing, and I didn&apos;t see a cracked case, so I thought it was just dirty. Sure enough though, I desoldered it - it looks like the back of the case blew out, even stripped the top layer off the PCB. So yeah, this was never gonna work.<br><br>If this video feels a bit... unenthusiastic? Like I didn&apos;t put in as much effort as it deserved? It&apos;s because I got about two hours into shooting it and realized that it felt like this thing SHOULD work, and that I was just not skilled enough to figure out what was wrong, so I lost a lot of drive and just tried to salvage something out of it. Turns out it wasn&apos;t my fault; wish I&apos;d realized that at the time.<br><br>Regarding the little six-pin device on the daughterboard plug: I had tried during shooting to get a good look at the label and couldn&apos;t make it out, but while looking at the board again today I suddenly found an angle where I could see the lettering. Turns out it says AAPN, which is a MAX6629 (or similar) temperature sensor! That makes a lot of sense!<br><br>If you see the early version of this video: There&apos;s a quip in there about 240V being used in Canada, which is based on something I saw <b>years</b> ago about Canadian houses being wired with split-phase specifically so they could bring out 240 to ordinary wall outlets. True or not, it doesn&apos;t seem like it&apos;s very common, so I removed that line with the youtube editor and it&apos;ll take effect sometime in the next 24-48 hours. <br> <br>Yes I pronounced Ontario wrong. Sorry :(<br><br>I quipped about FCPGA being basically &quot;the&quot; socket for CPUs with pins - that&apos;s true as far as most chips go, but what preceded that was plain PGA, without the FC; &quot;flip-chip&quot; referred to the die being upside down on top of the carrier instead of vice versa. Likewise, apparently ZIF came in with the first Pentium sockets - I suspected it was a bit older than I remembered, that&apos;s why I hedged on that point. It&apos;s actually the 486 I was thinking of, but those weren&apos;t any more pleasant to press-fit into a socket than the 370 chips; I remember breaking pins off of one or two trying to get them out, in fact.

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• NI

  @nickwort123 · 2 years ago

  The diagonal jumper is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life

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• GI

  @GigaDanMan · 2 years ago

  I think I need a “Boy Howdee counter” in the corner of the screen. Makes me smile every time.

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• MA

  @marsdeat · 2 years ago

  My first thought when you said it was rusted was &quot;Tim Hortons? Did someone decide to put a coffee machine right under it and let it slowly get steamed?&quot;

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• ER

  @EricJorgensen · 2 years ago

  I worked at one of the pioneering companies in the digital signage space during the era when this device would have been new. <br><br>We once got a unit back from a restaurant as &quot;defective&quot; that still smelled of the sanitizing floor cleaner they had mopped into it. Yeah the warranty claim was denied and we let customers know that they should put the unit somewhere where it will not be sloshed with cleaning fluids.

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• LY

  @Lyrainthevalley · 2 years ago (edited)

  Oh thank god! I&apos;m just about losing my sanity with my two year old today, my partner finally came home and could take over and I open up YouTube to find a fresh CRD upload. Seriously, you just made my evening. Thank you so much for your videos from a very, very tired mum

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• GA

  @game-tea · 2 years ago (edited)

  AFAIK digital signage is the more common term for what little guys get used for, narrowcasting is more of a marketing concept you can apply to digital signage.<br>Oh and if you google socket 1, which was used for all 486 variants after the 80486, you see that most of the images are ZIF. So they started using zif quite early, which makes sense as LIF is a pain for cpu&apos;s (and zif existed before lif anyway)

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• GR

  @grantstevens5 · 2 years ago

  Those 44-pin mini IDE cables were pretty common in the chunky laptops of that era. &nbsp;They were usually pretty short (for obvious reasons), but longer ones did exist. &nbsp;Also in that era, VIA CPUs were <b>really</b> cheap. If performance was of no real concern, there was probably no cheaper option. They showed up in all sorts of low-end devices, especially near the end of the Socket 7 era.

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• BE

  @Ben333bacc · 2 years ago (edited)

  The Pentium / Pentium MMX, AMD K5 / K6 were ZIF sockets. 486s were the last (x86) to be non-zif, iirc, and some socket 3 486s were lever style zero force. Now I feel old.

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• EU

  @EughWhy · 2 years ago (edited)

  Those caps look like they&apos;ve suffered a catastrophic failure and vented. So great call to replace them

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• RA

  @racecar_spelled_backwards868 · 2 years ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHukN0JsMpo&amp;t=2310">38:30</a> They went with Via because they were cheaper and lower power consumption. If you didn&apos;t need the performance and wanted to save every last possible dime, Via was your choice.

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• SO

  @sonicjms · 2 years ago

  The words &quot;they were bought by a company called Cineplex&quot; said so casually without a hint of irony threw me for a loop, if I go past a movie theater 9/10 times its a Cineplex. I had just assumed they were a large multinational that was probably US based since I&apos;ve never seen them advertise themselves as Canadian. It&apos;s like if someone said &quot;bought by a company called McDonalds&quot; or &quot;cooked with a vegetable called an onion&quot;.

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