First ebay Minimig sells for £214 (305 EUR / $428 US)

[whiteb]

I can vouch for the time taken on the making of the boards.

Those 0805 Capacitor's and Resistors *REALLY* take time because of their size

[whiteb]

nBit7 wrote:

1. solder a small amount of solder too one pad only
2. place the part next to the pad (such that is is over the other pad) then hold by the sides with tweezers.
3. heat the pad with the iron on the outside edge of the pad.
4. slide the component into the pre-soldered pad
5. remove iron, wait a few sounds then remove tweezers
6. solder the oppersite side.
7. add a little more solder (or flux) to the first side if needed

For the 0805's, thats EXACTLY the way I did it.

[whiteb]

countzero wrote:
there's one thing I wonder about minimig building. PIC and the FPGA must be pre programmed. programming the PIC would not be very difficult, but how do you program the FPGA ? or is it programmed dynamically every boot by the PIC from some media ? (sd card ?)

Pic is your "Floppy Controller".

At boot, the Pic Firsts listens briefly to the serial port for any contact for Firmware updates (If you have Bootloader installed), Then proceeds to load FPGA core from MMC, which gets Uploaded to the chip.

The system then undergoes a Warm boot, and the Pic then loads Kickstart into Ram (Or the FPGA does it i cant remember), and then warm Reboots once again, booting you into Kickstart.  Then you can load games/Workbench or stuff.

MMC/SD *MUST* contain 2 files in the root directory.  Minimig1.bin (FPGA Core) and kick.rom