Taking Stock of the Final Expansion 3 Kit

I finally sat down yesterday and printed out the bill of materials for the Final Expansion 3 kit.  The assembly instructions can be found here.  https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=767044

Note: This isn't a kit for the beginner, so if you are one you will have a better chance at success with help from someone with experience.  This is not a knock on the quality of the kit, which seems to be quite good.

So, I carefully examined each part on the bill of materials.  It was easy to identify most parts because they have markings that are listed.  There are three tiny parts without markings.  One is a crystal which is a tiny little metal can with two leads coming out of one end.  The other is a small white cardboard carrier with two tiny little rectangular dots.  These dots are two surface mount capacitors.

There are five surface mounted parts in this kit.  Assembling these is considered an advanced skill.  This will be my first time with surface mount components.  I am eager to give this a go.  YouTube videos showing how to do this are aplenty.

After carefully examining everything, I was able to account for all the parts in the kit.

Here is a photo of the unpopulated board.

I also posted a video about all this. 

Getting Ready to Build the Final Expansion 3 FE3 Kit for the VIC-20

Next stop - Assembly!  :-)

Upgrading to a Soldering Station

For some years now I have been using a cheap soldering iron with a 15W/30W switch that I purchased from Radio Shack (I miss them).  This has been just fine for the electric guitar modifications that I like to make, but I'm not comfortable using this iron for the Final Expansion 3 cartridge for my VIC-20.  I decided to purchase a soldering station with temperature control so I can tweak it while I'm doing my work.

Here is the station I bought on Amazon for about $30.

This is an AOYUE 469, which is a 60W iron.  It has a nice steel spring to keep the iron, which is much better than the cheap stamped stand I was using.  It has a place to put your spool of solder, and a place for a sponge (that's not a Post-it note!) to keep the iron tip clean.

Here you can see this does not let you specify a temperature.  The specifications provided state that the temperature is from 300F to 480F.  But, the dial goes to from 1 to 8 (not to 11)!

This is a photo of iron tip.  If you look carefully, it seems they have pre-tinned it for me.

Prelude to a Kit (Final Expansion 3)

Let me just show a few photos of what came in the Final Expansion 3 kit for the VIC-20 (that I ordered from SkydivinGirl over on the Atari Age forum) before I get down to beginning assembly, just so people can see what is in the box.

Here is how it came packaged.  I think this is fine because there is nothing in here that could be considered fragile, at least in the sense that glass is fragile.  ;-)

This is the bare board in a nice bright fire engine red.  You may notice there are a few spots where parts will need to be surface mounted, but its mostly thru-hole.  It should be a pretty easy build.  I used to do a lot of PCB assembly in my youth, so I'm comfortable with this.

The ICs came in this anti static bag. My understanding is that the ROMs are already programmed.

Here are the capacitors, resistors and other parts.

Finally it comes with two different kinds of stickers to choose from for the top of the cartridge case, which is not included.

I decided that I would not buy the optional case, which is more than $20 by itself.  Instead I decided to sacrifice an original VIC-20 Mole Attack! game to provide a cartridge.  I will need to cut some openings for the SIO ports that Final Expansion 3 uses to connect to the VIC-20 serial port and also out to another serial device such as a floppy drive.  Also openings for the SD card slot and for a bank of DIP switches will be needed.

Finally I'll note that the kit doesn't come with any assembly instructions, which surprised me.  Instead I needed to Google for them.  Save a tree?

Here's the link for the instructions.  They are for an older version of the board, but they should suffice.   http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=767044

Here is a quick video I did to showcase my VIC-20 and my other 6502 computers including a Commodore 128, an Apple Iic, and an Atari 800XL.  Enjoy!

The next video will be about the Final Expansion 3 kit that I will be soldering together.