Hey gang,
First post here and wanted to share my journey of fixing my son's Pokémon Emerald GBA cart. Story goes...not sure when he got it and honestly not sure if it ever fully worked (second hand) but oh about 5 years ago I replaced the internal battery for him. Not even sure if it worked back then after that battery replacement. So recently he is getting back into collecting them etc. and asked if I'd check the battery because the "battery has run dry" msg was coming up. Sure enough it was dead so I replaced it again. This time after the replacement the game would randomly crash. So I started to dig and look at the board under a lighted magnifying glass and low and behold a resistor (R9) near the + battery terminal pad was standing on end, meaning it was not landed to the pcb on both sides. LOL, that ain't right. So while it was up, aka one lead lifted, I checked the resistance and it measured 10K ohm which is correct. I attempted to re-land it under a desk electronics large magnifying lamp and my pro soldering station (been doing this kind of work most of my life, even trained to replaced nuclear reactor protective controls on submarines in the navy), we had to go to school and learn how to solder the right way. Well even these microscopic surface mount resistors are tiny, maybe .5mm total length! Got it landed and tested again. This time things were looking better, for awhile until it froze again. Hummm...
I started to really guess my R9 solder work and thought maybe I have a non-surface mount 10K ohm resistor (I tend to do some audio cross-over work from time to time). So I got into my electronics bins (caps, inductors, resistors, transistors, etc.) and sure enough I had a new pack of Radio Shack 10K ohm 5% tolerance resistors. After doing some funky shaping/bending of the big leads I managed to get the resistor to land and hold fast to the tiny pads for R9. Retesting showed same behavior though. So at this time I knew I needed to take more drastic measures. I decided to flux all pins of all IC's and re-solder all pins/legs. During this procedure I inadvertently lifted a same-sized capacitor on the far right of the board (C2) near the 0-4 marking on the board (the C2 is covered by the new battery). Damn the luck, as you can see it's a bit crooked but I managed to re-land it. Well after re-soldering all IC's testing for 1.5 days proved good w/o issue but then, out of nowhere a hang occurred. In addition, maybe every 3 or so power-on cycles the Nintendo DS Lite would not even recognize the GBA cart was inserted into the system. What the heck?
The final stab at this point was to remove the battery again, apply flux to all areas of the board and use my shop heat gun with a nozzle concentrator (about 1" diameter). Before going at the board I used my Celsius thermocouple probe and on high I was able to reach 320C 1/2" from the discharge of the heat gun. I put the board in my drill press vice and positioned it perfectly horizontal (keep things from shifting) I then slowly burned the board (some smoke, not much, probably mostly from the flux). Well, basically every component's leads were re-flowed with solder. BAM! FTW!
Folks, these carts are getting really old. They often use non-lead solder too which takes a lot higher temps to re-flow. Had to be some cold solder joint somewhere that was causing the issue.
Full resolution image of the repair, click the image to see the full 26MP photo: Well, looks like I need to post 5 times to post the link. I've attached the image anyway.
Roy
First post here and wanted to share my journey of fixing my son's Pokémon Emerald GBA cart. Story goes...not sure when he got it and honestly not sure if it ever fully worked (second hand) but oh about 5 years ago I replaced the internal battery for him. Not even sure if it worked back then after that battery replacement. So recently he is getting back into collecting them etc. and asked if I'd check the battery because the "battery has run dry" msg was coming up. Sure enough it was dead so I replaced it again. This time after the replacement the game would randomly crash. So I started to dig and look at the board under a lighted magnifying glass and low and behold a resistor (R9) near the + battery terminal pad was standing on end, meaning it was not landed to the pcb on both sides. LOL, that ain't right. So while it was up, aka one lead lifted, I checked the resistance and it measured 10K ohm which is correct. I attempted to re-land it under a desk electronics large magnifying lamp and my pro soldering station (been doing this kind of work most of my life, even trained to replaced nuclear reactor protective controls on submarines in the navy), we had to go to school and learn how to solder the right way. Well even these microscopic surface mount resistors are tiny, maybe .5mm total length! Got it landed and tested again. This time things were looking better, for awhile until it froze again. Hummm...
I started to really guess my R9 solder work and thought maybe I have a non-surface mount 10K ohm resistor (I tend to do some audio cross-over work from time to time). So I got into my electronics bins (caps, inductors, resistors, transistors, etc.) and sure enough I had a new pack of Radio Shack 10K ohm 5% tolerance resistors. After doing some funky shaping/bending of the big leads I managed to get the resistor to land and hold fast to the tiny pads for R9. Retesting showed same behavior though. So at this time I knew I needed to take more drastic measures. I decided to flux all pins of all IC's and re-solder all pins/legs. During this procedure I inadvertently lifted a same-sized capacitor on the far right of the board (C2) near the 0-4 marking on the board (the C2 is covered by the new battery). Damn the luck, as you can see it's a bit crooked but I managed to re-land it. Well after re-soldering all IC's testing for 1.5 days proved good w/o issue but then, out of nowhere a hang occurred. In addition, maybe every 3 or so power-on cycles the Nintendo DS Lite would not even recognize the GBA cart was inserted into the system. What the heck?
The final stab at this point was to remove the battery again, apply flux to all areas of the board and use my shop heat gun with a nozzle concentrator (about 1" diameter). Before going at the board I used my Celsius thermocouple probe and on high I was able to reach 320C 1/2" from the discharge of the heat gun. I put the board in my drill press vice and positioned it perfectly horizontal (keep things from shifting) I then slowly burned the board (some smoke, not much, probably mostly from the flux). Well, basically every component's leads were re-flowed with solder. BAM! FTW!
Folks, these carts are getting really old. They often use non-lead solder too which takes a lot higher temps to re-flow. Had to be some cold solder joint somewhere that was causing the issue.
Full resolution image of the repair, click the image to see the full 26MP photo: Well, looks like I need to post 5 times to post the link. I've attached the image anyway.
Roy
Last edited by LexTalionis,
