Since it is not that often that I do this kind of soldering a microscope like that is a bit expensive. I have a digital one from banggood with a 7inch screen. It does the job, but the depth perception is not great. Also the base of the stand is not that big so makes working on larger objects like this scope a problem.
A friend of mine has an optical stereo one and I must say it is definitely better than the digital one I have. Still it is something you have to get used to, working with a magnifying aid. Positioning tweezers and soldering iron is, for me at least, keeping your mind focused on the job. Might have to do with the fact that I often exchange left for right
You are right about that SMD is much nicer then through hole. No bending and clipping wires. Way faster to finish a board with only SMD then the same circuit with through hole components.
At the moment I'm looking into the original FPGA and the open source bitstream tools of mmicko, frenky pointed to on page 51 of this thread. Managed to revert the .bin from the FLASH back to a .bit file, which I can use in the Tang Dynasty IDE to reprogram the FPGA. Getting the CRC in the header right was a bit of a search over which data it needed to be calculated.
The
https://github.com/mmicko/prjtang/blob/master/docs/architecture/bitstream_format.rst is not to clear on this and the code found there is lacking good commenting. The code in the repository is written in either phyton or C++. Can read it, but not to experienced with it. More of a regular C fan. Might be more work to do stuff, but I find it better readable then C++. Did not manage to build the code yet. Have to do more research into the projects that are needed for this open source FPGA development.
A bit of a problem in this open source community is the lack of proper documentation. Sure I'm also not to big on writing documentation, but try to make things clear, I hope.
It is a challenge to reverse the bitstream data back to RTL and maybe verilog, but not sure how to. A good learning opportunity into the working of FPGA's. Not a big deal if I fail in this quest. On the background morris6 is doing a nice job in creating new programming for the FPGA.