Bolle's PCB Painstakingly Recreates Apple's Macintosh SE/30 Logic Board Three Decades Later
Designed to bring dead SE/30s back to life, the new logic board includes a few neat upgrades — such as a CR2032 battery holder.
Pseudonymous vintage Apple fan Bolle has recreated the logic board for the Apple Macintosh SE/30, bringing hope to anyone who has a non-functional unit they're looking to resurrect.
Vintage computing is a popular hobby, but many of the most popular devices have a finite lifespan. This is particularly true for circuit boards which play host to batteries, often used to keep real-time clocks ticking over while the machine is powered down, which have a tendency to leak corrosive liquid over the boards and destroy them if not removed before storage.
As a result, recreating fresh boards to replace damaged originals is a popular task — and one Apple fan Bolle set themself as a means to resurrect classic Apple Macintosh SE/30 machines, first released in 1989 and discontinued late 1991.
"The plan to redraw the available SE/30 schematics in Eagle has been in my head now for quite some time. It wasn't the task of having to redraw everything that kept me off, but I genuinely hate creating new devices in Eagle, so there goes that," Bolle explains. "Luckily @GeekDot kept bugging me about it and thankfully took over the job of creating Eagle devices for all the custom Apple ICs on the SE/30 board."
"This got me started and things quickly went down from there... a month ago I began copying the Apple schematics to Eagle. With most of the devices available this went through in a breeze. Only two days later I was already taking measurements on one of my SE/30 boards to arrange components and get them as close as possible to the original."
A few weeks later, Bolle had a working design — and set about having it produced as a four-layer board, reducing the cost compared to Apple's six-layer original. With physical boards in-hand, the design was proven by resurrecting an real Mac — though a flaw in the design, a swapping of the SCSI controller's data lines, prompted a bodge wire fix and a board respin.
More details are available on the 68kMLA forum thread where the project was announced; thus far, Bolle has not publicly released the design files.