I decided to take a shot and picked up some black dragon boards. While waiting for them to come in, what tools should I get to try to trouble shoot? I am told the boards work but have graphical glitches. I want to see how much I can get done without having to ship it off for repairs.
- Thread starter Solmin
- Start date
Multimeter
Soldering iron
Hookup wire
Logic probe
Programmer
Oscilloscope
Spare parts box with various capacitors, resistors, crystals, potentiometers, transistors and ICs.
Luck.
Soldering iron
Hookup wire
Logic probe
Programmer
Oscilloscope
Spare parts box with various capacitors, resistors, crystals, potentiometers, transistors and ICs.
Luck.
J
jassin000
In addition to this, get yourself a good pair of diagonal angled wirecutters/Shearcutters. I highly recommend an Xcelite 175M . It has so many applications and is a great go-to tool for various snipping needs.
Another good general purpose tool is a Nonconductive Alignment Tool (plastic). I have one of these and use it a lot for poking around boards, or adjusting voltages in PSU's.
One last suggestion, if you'll be needing to do a bunch of desoldering, save yourself the effort and get a dedicated desoldering iron. Solder suckers (bulb suckers, soldapullt) are indeed cheap, but they're harder to get efficient with. A desoldering tool makes things a lot easier, quicker and cleaner to remove, saving yourself from potentially burning out traces and damaging the board further.
It took me a very, very long time to get efficient with my Hakko desoldering tool after YEARS of using a soldapullt. For quite a while I was considering selling it on and just continuing with my old ways because it was so awkward for me. Finally it clicked though, and if nothing else learning to use the Hakko has done wonders for my wrist.
+1 on decent diagonal wirecutters. I have some from a hobby modeling toolset, and I use them constantly.
Hehe, yeah I'm terrible with a soldapullt. I've burnt so many traces in the past, and dreaded having to desolder anything, but once I bought a hakko desoldering tool (FR-300) I actually look forward to doing it now.
They're not cheap though, that's the only real downside, but after 100's if not 1000's of hours of poor desoldering, I found it worth the price of a good tool that made the job waaaaaay easier for me.
Last edited:
xodaraP
Legendary
This makes up a large portion of it, along with learning from others (start reading repair logs)
Would love to have a database like MAME for PCB repairs.
Solder suckers with pump are pretty brutal. Nobody likes those. Even with a desoldering station doing the "heavy lifting" though you will still need to have some desoldering braid around (cleaning pads for resolder, SMD work, bridged connections, etc). To me it make way more sense to start with that as a $5 investment vs $300+ for station. Only real down side is you will go through it faster without a station pulling most of the solder off for you. Example change flyback will have lots of solder to remove. Normally I will pull 98% of solder with station then use maybe 1 inch of braid cleaning the pads properly. Without station you can easily perform the same thing but you will use maybe 6 or 7 inch of braid removing the solder. For a beginner that is the way to go though. No real investment. IMO you will know when you need a station and then spend the cash. When you do then you still have your braid you need anyway. For me if I'm not doing 10+ joints I probably won't even fire up my desolder station because it's more efficient just to grab the braid and use that. Certainly for 1 or 2 cap or small IC here and there you can get away without the money for station.
ShootTheCore
Legendary
Check out the JAMMA Arcade PCB Repair Logs. @caius documents his repairing miracles regularly.
http://www.jammarcade.net/pcb-repair-logs/
