68 Dead Floppy Emus, 65 Rescued: Inside a Hardware Failure Analysis
Floppy Emu Hardware Failure Analysis Results
After years of accumulating QA failures, I finally dedicated a month to failure analysis on 68 Floppy Emu boards. The leading culprit? Clock crystals—42 boards had no clock or a bad clock, traced to a substitute crystal damaged during assembly. Other causes included bad CPLD chips, unprogrammed microcontrollers, soldering issues, and even a missing LED. I managed to revive 65 of the 68 boards, and the lessons learned will shape future design and assembly changes.
Knowledge is power, as they say, and now I have lots of power.
- sdcfgy
Crystal failures are always a problem. We used to chuck a bag of them in a tumbler for an hour then on a tray on a vibration table for an hour. About 20% would fail on test from being entirely open circuit to being way off frequency.
- cmptrnerd6
Did they say how many they built total? Was this 60ish boards out of 100, 600, 6000?