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!  :-)

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!