Feels Like the First Time

I started soldering when was about 10 years old, and I have hundreds of hours of soldering experience under my belt.  Having said that, my first foray into surface mount soldering made me feel like a novice all over again.

The Final Expansion 3 cartridge (an SD card floppy drive emulator and RAM/flash memory card) build that I've started for use with my VIC-20 has several surface mount components, and two of these are capacitors so small that I was afraid I was going to lose them.  It's not an exaggeration to say they could be mistaken for salt crystals.  Perhaps the kit should have provided a spare or two just in case.  ;-)

Here are photos of my work.

What I found most difficult was holding the parts precisely in place while soldering them.  The way I tried was to flow solder onto the pads and then put a little flux on that and place the parts and touch them with the iron, reflowing the solder.  This was hard to do, and especially with the C6 and C7 capacitors.  They are so much smaller than I expected and it was very hard to center the parts over the pads.  Even with tweezers it was a task.  Notice in the photos above C7 is off center, but I checked it carefully with my meter and it seems okay so I decided to go with it.

Maybe pre-tinning the pads was a bad idea because it was hard to make the parts rest completely flat against the board.  Another idea might have been to use solder wick to remove excess solder before placing the parts, and then putting a tiny blob of solder on the tip of the iron and applying it to the capacitor?

So, if I'm going to become good at surface mount work I'm going to need a lot more practice but this project is mostly thru hole work.

Onward and upward!

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

VIC-20 Final Expansion 3 kit

In order to get serious about doing anything on the Commodore VIC-20 you really need to be able to get files into and out of the real machine, in my humble opinion.  I have also started using the VICE emulator, but whatever you do should be tested on the real hardware, and ultimately that's where the fun is.  ;-)

So, I've looked at a few options and I've settled on the Final Expansion 3 (FE3) cartridge kit.  I'm very comfortable soldering things together, and it makes things more interesting.  I also purchased a budget temperature controlled soldering station because the cheap iron I've been using for years doesn't seem suitable to me for doing this project because there is a little bit of surface mount soldering involved.

Here are a couple of photos of the blank board.

One really cool feature of this board the serial ports that hang off the back.  I can plug my VIC-20 serial port into the FE3 and use it's 512K of flash RAM (or an inserted SD card) as a huge floppy disk, and I'm told that I can even plug my Commodore 128 into it while it is being powered by the VIC-20, and use it as a floppy drive for that machine too!  Very cool!