Hats off to you and many congrats on taking this project to the max and reviving your BE's. I have to ask what Solder iron do you have? That must of been a tedious task to solder the chip properly to the board. WOW! I have experience with soldering but not with such small components. Anyways...good post, link and pictures. Will be downloading the referenced serial programming software. Cheers.
yes, i have a jovy proffessional hotair station in my work, but i use a cheap 80€ aoia hotairstation from ebay since 7 years... this cheap hotair works since 7 years pefectly till today...
i have 2 other cheap hotairs from china, this two didnt work good since day 1.
but the first one is doing its job realy good.
i like it more then the expensive jovy system.
sometimes i use irda station too, but i dont like it... i have a better feeling with the hotair station.
i solder with it mostly micro usb connectors of phones, bga's, other connectors, smd parts...
i also repaired many ati hd5970 grafikcards with it.
mostly the volterra vrm's getting demaged over time caused by overclocking and heat.
but for that you need a preheater too, you cant desolder vrm's without a preheater.
if you work with elektronics, especialy with smd parts, buy a cheap (not the cheapest) hotairstation.
you get it from 50€ to some tausends euros...
look for aoya hotairstations, arround 80€, they seems to be realy good for the money.
its realy worth and makes the work mutch more easy.
but you need to get a feeling for it (air, temp, time), you need to get some skills to handle it correctly
without demaging your targets, better learn on old motherboards first.
you cant solder big chips like nvida grafik chips or cpus, but you can solder most connectors, bga's in
size of gsm phones chips.
for bigger chips you need a realy big irda station with pre-heater.