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A comment on Raspberry Pi has PCBs for 100 beta $25 PCs. Parent comment

Re:Raspberry Pi has PCBs for 100 beta $25 PCs by sliverstorm on Thursday December 01, 2011 @04:37PM (#3301494)
A determined hobbyist can handle that stuff. As I understand, the only thing that really stops a determined hobbyist is BGA.

Which, actually, might be exactly what the square in the middle is. In which case they certainly will not be marketing bare boards.

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Re:Raspberry Pi has PCBs for 100 beta $25 PCs by shabble on Thursday December 01, 2011 @08:10PM (#3302231)
Some BGAs are possible with the right size shims and a hot-air gun (even a cheap £20 gas iron with hot-air tip has worked in the past).

Debugging/QA is utterly impossible though (since it generally involves x-rays), so if it doesn't work, you get to start over.

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Re:Raspberry Pi has PCBs for 100 beta $25 PCs by bisrig on Thursday December 01, 2011 @09:22PM (#3302386)
Or a toaster oven and reflow controller a la the Sparkfun board (though a bunch of other hobbyist folks have done the same or similar).

Agree on the debugging part though.

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Re:Raspberry Pi has PCBs for 100 beta $25 PCs by sliverstorm on Thursday December 01, 2011 @08:13PM (#3302242)
Yup, I totally want to try my hand at it sometime, but the complete lack of debug/qa seems critical enough I wouldn't ever claim to be "able to do bga". Settle for "I did a bga once".
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