[yestergearpc]

Eric is a very well-known reverse engineering hobbyist. He's RE'd several boards over the past several years, all are on his github. He also has built several novel designs from scratch (Such as the Graphics Gremlin - a FPGA-based MDA/CGA card that outputs to a VGA monitor).

[MegaDeKay]

You didn't mention that he also co-authored the book "Open Circuits" that shows cross sectional images of a wide variety of electrical and electronic components. The pictures are beautiful.

His "secret" is basically sanding. Lots and lots of sanding.

https://www.amazon.com/Open-Circuits-Beauty-Electronic-Compo...

[naturalmovement]

Cool.

Still doesn't change the fact that this is an untested board design that relies on a difficult-to-source obsolete chip.

If some pins are swapped by mistake e.g. power and ground you are screwed.

Caveat emptor — unfortunately this was buried in the description.

[noone_youknow]

This is open-source hardware, caveat emptor is implied.

At this stage in a project like this, I’d expect the people who were getting boards fabbed to also have the skills to sanity check the schematics and layout before they sent the gerbers off to China.

[thinkingQueen]

That’s a fairly unreasonable take. We are talking about a hobbyist Github account reverse engineering decades old hardware. The warning is in italics clearly after the introduction. This is stuff for the experts. What more do you want?