Hacking Thinking of doing a hard mod. Recommendations?

[hisagishi]

Basically the title, any specific soldering irons or anything else that might make my life doing this easier?

I've heard of people using conductive glue for this type of work before but honestly that sounds kind of silly imo.

 

[FAST6191]

To the best of my knowledge there are only three types of hardmod for the 3ds

1) NAND dumper/flasher

2) Video capture

3) Control redirect/turbo/outside inputs/autoplay inputs (or I guess control reads).

I am not sure if there are still kits for 2) either -- most seemed to want you to send the thing off.

1) is fine but I am not sure what you are going to get from it -- software dumping is possible with a 4.5 system. Should you hose things up hard enough to need it then I would solder in the thing to flash the 4.5 dump back.
I guess there is a slight variation on the theme if you somehow went back and bricked your 3ds with the early gateway/gateway derived stuff.
About the only real use then would be if you have a later system, say one on 9.2. If gateway's new exploit is indeed stopped by 9.3 then you could dump the 9.2 for your 3ds, use the new firmwares for eshop/online and then downgrade when it gets released.
I am not sure what there is in the way of dual nand right now but if you get a 4.5 system then it is all in software anyway.

Specific soldering irons... you are doing close soldering on small pads/pins/traces on a modern multilayer board. Plan accordingly. I like hot air for this sort of thing but you can definitely still use a soldering iron.

Conductive glue. Not a particular fan of the stuff myself, or at least not the stuff you can buy in shops*, but there is little need for a permanent mod for the NAND stuff, to that end it has its uses.

*a friend once did a sort of money basically no object type test to see if they could make some of it, the results were impressive.

I guess you could invent another mod (memory dumping/tracing/fiddling might be nice) but if you want that and are asking these sorts of questions then it not something I would suggest.

 

[hisagishi]

Is a gateway nand dump the exact same as a hardmod nand dump? Just on the hypothetical chance that something were to happen and an update failed completely bricking my system.(say the power went off of the system mid update or something) Would I be able to then mod the 3ds and use the gateway dump? I was under the impression that you couldn't dump the sysnand from any form of software no matter how "hacky".

If gateway can dump sysnand then I'd rather cross the bridge of "doing a hard mod when necessary" instead. No use doing it now as theres really no reason.

 

[HBK]

Yeah, I'll be doing the NAND mod on my 3DS XL soon. I have a backup of 4.2 that I made with my Gateway in May, and my sister accidentally updated the sysNAND to 6.1 (with the Pokemon X cart) about a month ago. I updated it to 9.2, and plan to dump that for future storing and then flashing 4.2 back to get my Gateway working again.