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!  :-)

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

Soldering and machine code

I should probably interject here that a year or so before I really got into programming my brother Neil bought me a kit radio for my birthday. It was a small battery powered AM radio, which did not look like a kit at all when completed. It could easily have passed for a commercial offering you would buy at a department store.

This kit was great fun to put together, and it helped me learn how to solder. I would use this skill as I got older for many purposes, some of them computer related.

I wish there was more of a kit culture today. While you can build robots with Lego Mindstorms and similar systems, it makes sense to learn things as fundamentally as possible.

In a similar way people studying computers should consider learning at least a simple machine code. For example before I had any opportunity to program in machine code I read a book on Z80 machine code. Eventually I had some chance to write 6502 assembly. I never mastered assembly language but it was valuable experience. I suspect that many young people studying computer science today are not exposed to the bare hardware of the machine these days. Universities should be held to account for this IMHO.