Changing caps and updating the hardware

It took some time but finally in autumn 2020 I got time to change the caps for the Amiga. I had ordered a capacitor kit from amigastore.eu a year earlier and in addition to that I also got then newly released AmigaOS 3.1.4.

I removed the old caps using two solder stations. I heated the capacitors' legs and my son took the caps out with tweezers. There was luckily no signs of any leakage so I could just clean the board with ipa and solder the new caps in place.

Caps removed
After testing that the machine booted ok I also changed the roms to the 3.1.4. 


I had started to think about upgrading my Amiga a bit more so I had also made couple new part orders, including EIDE'99, 68882 FPU for the Blizzard 1230-IV, laser upgrade for the mouse and new power connector from Amigastore.eu. In addition to those I got also SilverStone SST-ST30F 300W SFX PSU from Amazon and a Gotek drive from eBay. I wanted to make a new adapter to ATX->Amiga and used an ATX extension cable from eBay to build one. Once finished I tested it shortly with the new PSU and adapter seemed to work fine.

For Gotek I first ordered a 0,91" 128x32px OLED display and rotary encoder. When the OLED display arrived I noticed it had broken during the shipment because of poor packaging so I made a new order of two different sized 0,96" 128x64px and 1,54" 128x64px displays. I got an idea that maybe I could integrate the bigger OLED display to the Amiga case while using the smaller in the Gotek case.

I have done some Arduino development during last few years and started to think that maybe I got use one in the Amiga project. I had now and extra OLED display and also some infrared receivers. Maybe I could use both of those?

With some studying and testing I decided that this new OLED display would replace the leds in my Amiga and I could also make a remote controlled power and reset switches plus Gotek selector. Display could show icons for power, df0, df1 and hdd drives, network activity and so on.


I still wanted to have floppy disk in addition to Gotek so I went looking for the external disk drive controller that I though I had somewhere. But I couldn't find it anywhere, so I came into conclusion that might have sold it at some point.

So I needed to find a controller for the extra drive. What I found was Sakura-IT's AmiExtFDD. I made a custom version of the pcb for myself. One with possibility to chain new drive with DB23/DB25 and a form factor that allowed to be used in external casing also. While ordering pcbs I made also custom version of SukkoPera's OpenAmigaJoyMouseSwitcher. What I changed was another port for game controller (just direct connection) and a PS/2 port for Lyra keyboard adapter. Third pcb for that same order was Open Amiga Sampler.


Now I had pretty much the hardware that I was planning to use in my "ultimate" A1200. It was time to design how to get all that hardware into the case in nice looking way.

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