Sop8 to dip8 (converting soldered bios to socketed bios)

[Somerandomtechyboi]

I have now come to the conclusion that instead of bothering to flash soldered bios chips with an unreliable and annoying test clip if an spi header is either not available or has no known pinout, im just gonna convert them and the board to dip8, besides ill need a hot air tool for bga rework later on anyways and those are well within reach for me to go and buy

 

Now how am i gonna convert

Into

?

 

With

Thingy, though i can buy ones that include pins, and i already have some really long pin headers laying around that i can cut up, effectively turns the sop into a dip and i can treat it like a dip chip so no need for special sop socket on the bios programmer

 

But then how am i gonna put a dip socket on an sop motherboard?

im gonna jam

Into

Of course, and now i can solder it onto the sop solder pads with some solder paste and a hot air tool, i have the low temp 138c stuff too so shouldnt have to heat the board much

 

and i can do this on any board cheaply cause the adapters themselves are like 5 cents and dip sockets 2 cents, so its feasable even on the cheapest of boards, just comes down to labor and i dont really mind spending abit of time

 

 

The conversion should go something like this

 

Desolder bios chip

 

Solder one of those adapter things onto the board with solder paste and hot air, low temp paste should come in pretty handy here cause the heats gonna have to go through the adapter pcb

 

Solder the dip8 socket onto the adapter, i think i can use hot air and solder paste too though i think ill be better off with a solder station and some good solder to not heat everything else up again

 

Board conversion done now onto converting the chip itself which should be as simple as soldering the chip onto an adapter pcb again with hot air and solder paste and soldering the neccesary pins so it can actually be put into the dip8 socket

 

Full conversion done and that cost a grand total of what? 10 cents or so + a few minutes? now that board can be flashed with just a bios programmer which means immunity to corruption issues and easy crossflashing

 

Stuff needed : solder paste, hot air station, adapter pcbs, dip8 sockets, board that will be converted which will also come with the sop bios chip that needs converting into dip8

 

It should work as long as everything matches electrically

 

 

Now im just wondering if there are any gaping holes in my plans or optimizations that can be made, or maybe itll just work? i can sack the half working p43 neo for this aswell since ill be crossflashing the bios to p45 anyways since i wanna know if p43 440fsb limit is purely bios or it really is an arbitrary limitation on the chipset itself, but i guess im modding the bios before fixing the damn northbridge cause @Levent suggested that i should get some experience with soldering before screwing around with bga rework, if it rolls codes then the conversion has worked, if not then it was all a waste of time but i should be able to undo the conversion by just desoldering everything and soldering the bios chip back onto the board

[Zagna]

Something like https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001100547871.html?

[Somerandomtechyboi]

2 minutes ago, Zagna said:

Something like https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001100547871.html?

Damn, didnt know something like that existed, wayyyyy too expensive, gonna take too much time to ship, and im pretty sure there are problably none here in indonesia cause that problably has an extremely niche usecase that for some reason needs swappable sop chips without needing to solder

 

But ill definitely keep it in mind as an inspiration incase i come up with a modification to my current design or a completely new design

[mariushm]

You can just take two   headers, solder thin wires to the pins, put some heatshrink over the solder points for insulation and then solder the other ends of the wires to the soic pads on the motherboard.

Now you can simply put a DIP socket into those two headers

 

Ex of such header:

(5 positions) : https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/mill-max-manufacturing-corp/315-47-105-41-003000/7364053

(8 positions) : https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/mill-max-manufacturing-corp/310-47-108-41-001000/7364036

 

Then it's just a matter of having good flux and a good soldering iron tip so that you can quickly solder the wires to the soic pads

 

[Somerandomtechyboi]

7 minutes ago, mariushm said:

You can just take two   headers, solder thin wires to the pins, put some heatshrink over the solder points for insulation and then solder the other ends of the wires to the soic pads on the motherboard.

Now you can simply put a DIP socket into those two headers

 

Ex of such header:

(5 positions) : https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/mill-max-manufacturing-corp/315-47-105-41-003000/7364053

(8 positions) : https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/mill-max-manufacturing-corp/310-47-108-41-001000/7364036

 

Then it's just a matter of having good flux and a good soldering iron tip so that you can quickly solder the wires to the soic pads

 

Idk whats the diff between those 2 but i can tell that those are for through hole

 

So basically i solder some thin wires on the sop8 pads, then solder those wires onto the bottom of these through hole headers, and solder a dip socket into the headers? Or do the headers already act like a dip socket and i can just insert a dip chip into it?

 

Not sure about soldering thin wires, seems alot more tedious than just putting some solder paste on the sop pads, lining a pcb ontop of it, and pointing a hot air tool at it

[mariushm]

The difference between those two is the number of pins / through holes there are in the header. The first one has 5,  the second one has 8.

You don't have to use ALL of them .. so for example in a DIP8 you could use only 4 out of the 5 and use that 5th hole as a key, to know pin 1 is the one immediately after the unconnected hole.

You wanted something cheap and simple. 

 

You can also get right angle pin headers with the right pitch ... for example standard 8 pin SOIC will have 1.27mm / 0.05" pitch, so you can easily get a header with 1.27mm/0.5" pitch between pins, put solder paste on the soic pads, put the header over the paste, heat up the board until the pins are soldered.

Example of such header : https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/sullins-connector-solutions/GRPB051VWCN-RC/1786468

The example has 5 pins, but you can easily cut one off for a 4 pin version

Then once you have your 2  4 pin headers soldered to soic fooprint it's just a matter of soldering your own pcb with the DIP footprint on top of these pins. You can make adapter pcbs at jlcpcb for a couple dollars.

 

You just have to be careful as it's not always SOIC footprint, some motherboards will use WSON or other packages.

 

[Somerandomtechyboi]

24 minutes ago, mariushm said:

You can make adapter pcbs at jlcpcb for a couple dollars.

 

26 minutes ago, mariushm said:

You can also get right angle pin headers with the right pitch ... for example standard 8 pin SOIC will have 1.27mm / 0.05" pitch, so you can easily get a header with 1.27mm/0.5" pitch between pins, put solder paste on the soic pads, put the header over the paste, heat up the board until the pins are soldered.

Example of such header : https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/sullins-connector-solutions/GRPB051VWCN-RC/1786468

The example has 5 pins, but you can easily cut one off for a 4 pin version

I have pliers, if i cant find a header like that for cheap ill find something with similar specs and just bend the thing myself, i got pliers after all, might have to buy another though to hold the thing down while im bending it

 

Im looking to make this conversion for well under 1$ and my origibal idea is only like 10 cents or so, though yea blindly aligning a pcb isnt really the best idea is it so maybe ill implement something similar to what @Zagna suggested in my final design, and actually thats just the generic sop8 socket but soldering to those smaller holes so i could just do that but god damn it im not paying 2$ a board for that

 

[mariushm]

Soldering wires to the SOIC pads is free. Soldering the other end of the wire to a DIP socket is also free.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

On 1/2/2023 at 9:11 PM, mariushm said:

Soldering wires to the SOIC pads is free. Soldering the other end of the wire to a DIP socket is also free.

Good point, but im gonna have to use a super thin strand of copper wire, positioning will be pain but soldering ill just use solder paste for soldering the wires to soic pads

 

The dip socket should hopefully be abit more forgiving since i can wrap the thin strand of wire around the dip socket pins so they dont move all over the place, though abit tedious

 

And for securing the thing onto the board since thin strands of wire arent exactly strong ill problably just use superglue or silicone gasket maker

 

 

Though i wonder if i can just solder some headers ontop the bios chip itself, basically make a janky spi header of sorts right on top of the bios chip