Question Messed up my solder on Ashida wii trim

[Ins0mnia]

Hey guys,

I’m new to portables and ambitiously decided to build an Ashida. Welp, fast forward 2 weeks of waiting for all the parts and another 10+ hours over 3 days building the thing, all was going as well as it could’ve considering I’m a novice, until I was at the finish line and only had left to solder onto the video encoder chip. My soldering iron slipped and I bridges the pins. A few minutes later of trying to fix it and I’m super discouraged. All my hard work feels like it was wasted after I completely botched my attempt to fix it. I’m under the assumption that I need to buy, hack, trim, and install a completely new wii based on the picture right? I feel so defeated lol.

 

[Lemoncake]

Not necessarily! Bridging connections like this can be a huge pain to fix but it isn't unredeemable. If you have some flux, I'd spread some all over those pins, then if you've got any copper desolding braid, position it on top of that area then carefully heat up the copper braid with you soldering iron. It may take a couple tries (and a lot of patience, make sure to take your time) but you should be able to clear all the solder bridges eventually. In terms of the pin whose trace you've ripped out, that's H-Sync, which is pretty important for VGA video which is likely what your trim will use as video out for the screen.

Since it's still connected to the chip, you may be able to solder on a magnet wire and then reconnect the trace to another component, but I'm not sure which one yet. By the way, have you confirmed before this that your trim works?

 

[Ins0mnia]

Yes I did confirm the trim worked prior to this. I probably won’t be able to get around to attempting what you said for a few days. After failing like that I got super discouraged and I feel like I need to take a break from it and come back. If I can’t fix it, then I would need a new board right?

 

[CosmicRazberry]

Yeah hopefully you can get it off with lots of flux and some solder wick. Just don't try to do it all at once go slow. And I would probably not even attempt to bend that H-sync pin back you may just break it off. Just solder a magnet wire to it at that angle. But if you just can't get them unbridged or you cant solder to the H-sync and V-sync legs a new board would likely be your next option.

 

[Thomothy]

Well if you can’t get H and V sync working you can always use composite.