Marathon Soldering Session Last Night

Wow!
I stayed up until 3am last night, soldering for 7 straight hours... Well, soldering, desoldering, and hot gluing, I guess I should say. I was working on hacking the Casio EV-680 portable LCD TV, which is the most expensive part of the project.

I was pretty nervous, knowing that I only had one shot at getting it right. And I still don't know if I messed up, and won't know until I test out the final product! I had some trouble desoldering a few spots on the board, and my biggest mistake was trying to forcibly pull out the audio/video jack without it being fully desoldered... it wound up breaking into a few small pieces. OUCH. But, I super glued it back together, and I think it will suffice. I don't think I will ever be actually able to use the jack, but since I was never planning on it, it shouldn't matter. From what I can tell, the part that broke isn't that critical... but I guess we shall see!

The toughest part, by far, was bending down the 18 tiny pins on one board and soldering them to the tiny pins on the board below (you can see these pins just under the LCD screen in the photo above). It wasn't so bad until I accidentally got some solder in between two adjacent pins -- if you know anything about surface tension, you can imagine how difficult it was to get the melted solder out from between the two pins. I kept just touching the iron to the solder, then wiping it on my wet sponge until I got enough off that it broke the surface tension bond.

I tested out the continuity of my soldered wires using my multimeter, and the thing that makes me nervous is that I have some connections that are definitely connected to ground, and I'm not sure that they should be! The first three pins of the 18 pins I mentioned above are all effectively connected to each other and to ground, but since they aren't physically connected, I would have to assume they are connected to ground on the circuit board itself. I'm also worried about one of the two knobs I desoldered and reconnected using long wires -- there is one pin that is connected to ground on one knob, and the same pin on the other knob is not connected to ground. Hopefully they are supposed to be different! What makes me even more nervous is that the one connected to ground is one of the ones I couldn't properly desolder, and wound up breaking a pin off in (then eventually pulled it out). I'm hoping I didn't do some microscopic damage to the circuit board that now is making that pin connect to ground accidentally?? Who knows. Well, at least I'm having fun.