Concealed Display Fail

[REBinc]

Just search the forum, its listed on here. They're 1206, stop wasting your money on the wrong ones.

[robcollins5]

Oh Hell. I didn't realize that 1206 was a legit LED part number/size. I'm on it, now! I hope they can cancel my order....


rc

[robcollins5]

Hopefully this is worth a few laughs and some moderate enjoyment. Remember guys, don't laugh AT me....laugh WITH me. =)






It was somewhat of a chain reaction. As mentioned, My hand slipped when I was soldering on the (miniature) LED for K band. I hit one of the resistors? to the right, and bent it upwards. It all went downhill from there. When I tried to loosen it, rearrange it, and solder it back down I ended up separating a few of the other resistors in the chain of events...

I figured I'll give this board a shot with the new LEDs (that are the right size) that should be arriving tomorrow. This is what it looks like now, after trying to repair all my mistakes.

rc

[srtga]

Looks like you may have been putting too much pressure on the parts with your iron causing you to slip. Let the heat do the work...

You also need to make sure you don't leave any "cold" joints. They will fail with vibration.

If you can salvage it get a junkyard rearview and see if you can stick it in there!

[robcollins5]

Well the whole point of the concealed display was to place it inside my dash. I have a bit of a "cockpit" theme going and I'd rather not avert my eyes up and to the right as often as the V1 goes off. (which I LOVE) We'll see what happens with this one. My only real concern with this board is that I may have reversed the polarity on some of the parts that are obviously jacked up. We'll have to see what happens!

rc

[srtga]

Well the whole point of the concealed display was to place it inside my dash. I have a bit of a "cockpit" theme going and I'd rather not avert my eyes up and to the right as often as the V1 goes off. (which I LOVE) We'll see what happens with this one. My only real concern with this board is that I may have reversed the polarity on some of the parts that are obviously jacked up. We'll have to see what happens!

rc

Yea, I always wondered about mirror installs. Your RD would be there anyway...

[robcollins5]

You guys aren't going to believe this....

With the help of a solder wick, I was able to clean up the board and re-attach the little pieces by reference to other peoples pics of the board. I got my LEDs in last night and was able to attach them without trouble. The CD works! The only hitch is that the LED for my backward arrow will not illuminate. When I pass current through it the LED will light up and when I place the probes on the next circuit item out on each side the LED lights up....but in operation it does not. I may have something placed backward. Hopefully it doesn't cause a surge or drop back to my V1. I'll post pictures of the LEDs lit up in the next couple days. =)

rc

[MEM-TEK]

Looks like you may have been putting too much pressure on the parts with your iron causing you to slip. Let the heat do the work...

You also need to make sure you don't leave any "cold" joints. They will fail with vibration.

If you can salvage it get a junkyard rearview and see if you can stick it in there!

Yeah, it looks like he is going to have to use a solder sucker or desoldering braid which first is swabbed with a bit of flux in order to get the braid to draw efficiently in order to clean up that mess. And when soldering in tiny SMD LEDs like these, I like to use my smallest jewelers screwdriver and put very tiny dabs of flux on the board pads where the LED gets soldered to. I'm not sure if the V1's display board is RoHS compliant, so I would use rosin flux and rosin core solder rather than lead-free solder. Clean-up of excess flux is easy after all is done by carefully using ear swabs and isopropyl alcohol.

[robcollins5]

I actually developed a little bit different method. I've never used flux, and honestly am not sure what benefit it has in working with small electronics. What I did is feed about 1 inch of the solder wire onto the tip of the iron. It formed a "droplet" that I dabbed on each of the contact pad areas. I'm not sure why this happens, but when you "dab" that droplet onto each of the contact pads it transfers the perfect amount of solder onto the pad in a "bubble" shape. Once I did that, I placed a part on the board, squeezed it down with tweezers and briefly touched the iron to the contact pad. The solder that I had "dabbed" there previously flash-melted an flash-hardened to secure the part. I have very shakey hands (despite giving up soda for lent) so this was the safest way for me to do this minute work without injuring the board further.

rc