Why I have three soldering irons and use two for SMT.

Well.. first of all I took care of the obligation to the family:  Monopoly in which I got destroyed in short order.

My two oldest boys (left to right, Brandon, 9.. Matthew, back, 8) and my wife Lisa (who won).

Anyway I got back on the SDR-Cube Yahoo list after losing big and saw an interesting (and informative) debugging thread on the first working cube built by others (i.e. not George or Juha) ... KE4NYV .. and in his case he had a buffer tilted (a criticism of plate reflow soldering?  Nah, not from me but you do need to check for proper surface tension "suck in" of the devices.  KE4NYV is guilty of getting me playing with paste solder actually... :O) the ICD2 header put on the wrong side of the board (!!! YES I PASSED THE DISEASE ON TO OTHERS !!!) and well.. following the original instructions.

This is what came out of that.  Once the first problem was fixed, he set the contrast and fixed the last problem, his board set officially came up as #1.  N1RX was #2.  If I only didn't NUKE that right angle connector...sigh...

Anyway here was the second problem.  This actually makes me glad I wasn't #1...

ACTION:  Only install R4, R5 and R6 if you will be using the onboard Si570 clock generator (IC1).  Otherwise, do not populate the R4, R5 and R6 positions on the Controls board!

REASON:  When R4, R5 and R6 are in place, the dsPIC controller expects to see an onboard Si570, instead of none or an external one on a Softrock.  So if no Si570 is found on the Controls board, the status read operation always comes back as “busy” and the Cube will hang during the boot-up process.   


So if you were like me and followed the original instructions.. here are the unofficial rework instructions.


1. Remove the Control board from the case if you "stored" it there like I did by taking the encoder knob off and all of the standoff screws.


2. Take the LCD panel off the front of the standoffs.  Carefully tilt up the LCD display.  Remove the bottom right (circled in blue in the photo below) standoff completely and also remove the rightmost grey key cap.


3. Take your two soldering irons (which is why I have two good ESD safe irons for SMT work) and simply float off the components.  R4, R5 and R6-- circled in RED.


4.  Use flux and solder wick to completely clean off the solder from the pads.


5.  Use solvent to clean off the flux.

(Taken through my ring magnifier light.. not bad quality.. I'm impressed)

Looks as good as new, doesn't it?

6. As you are doing this.. place the removed components on a card to save them:

7. Reinstall the rightmost bottom standoff.  Carefully bend the flex cable back and reinstall the LCD.  Make sure the flex cable "bubble" inset isn't rubbing on anything.

8. Reinstall the grey key cap.

Done..  I reinstalled it into the Cube case since I want to protect the LCD.

I really want to start on the DSP card.. but tomorrow would be a smarter day for it.  Until I get the replacement connector I'm not firing it up anyhoo...


2 mins to 2011 in central time zone...signing off