NEW PCB ARRIVED, BEGAN ASSEMBLY
PCBWay.com finished building the board and sent it my way. I was away for a week visiting family in Providence. The box arrived while I was away and I inspected the new boards as soon as I got home. They looked great, particularly the pads that previously were not shaped properly but now will cause the IBM connectors to align properly when solder paste is melted.
The first step was to load the FPGA on the Digilent CMOD S7 daughterboard with my synthesized logic implementation. I used the Xilinx Vivado tool to install a memory configuration file onto the flash RAM on the daughterboard, so that at power-on it will program the FPGA.
The connectors between this card and the IBM 1130 logic compartment were built by removing IBM manufactured spring contacts from a donor Solid Logic Technology (SLT) board. These contacts have a special shape that locks against the pins on the SLT backplane to hold the card in place once it is pushed down into a backplane slot.
Using 183C solder paste, I installed the recycled IBM connectors on one side using that high heat paste. When I was satisfied with the alignment of all of them, I flipped the board, lowered the heat settings of my hot air tool and table, then soldered the other side's connectors with the 138C paste, thus ensuring that my first set of connectors did not come loose while I heated the second set for soldering.
CONNECTOR COVERS INSTALLED
The 3D printed nylon covers then went over the contacts to form the mating for this board to slide into the M4 and M5 sockets on the SLT backplane in gate A, compartment C1 of the IBM 1130. They fit nicely and the connector looked correct to the eye.
MECHANICAL LOCKING OF CARD INTO SLOT
Because I had used IBM connectors recycled from old SLT cards, the snap lock should work exactly as it does on IBM build cards. I confirmed this when I pushed the card down into slots M4 and M5 of the B gate, C1 compartment in the 1130. It pushed down into place, showed some resistance to being removed, then popped out just like an IBM made card.
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