HP97 The journey begins
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07-23-2021, 05:10 AM
(This post was last modified: 07-23-2021 05:17 AM by teenix.)
Post: #394
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RE: HP97 The journey begins
Hi all,
A rather frustrating day today after trying to populate the board. I don't know if it's me but it seems to be getting more difficult to solder some of the chips on the circuit boards I have been getting made lately - even after cleaning. It used to be that using flux gel and just whisking the iron tip over the multiple close spaced pins resulted in a nice clean solder job. Now, the soldering takes a few goes to get the job done and even then some pins won't solder properly resulting in trying to re-solder again and having to clean up inevitable solder bridges. Even some of the actual joints look a bit sad. It is always a bit of a "squint the eyes" moment when applying power to a new board, and in this case, no smoke, but the PIC programmer would not recognize the PIC. I verified that the MCLR pin was not soldered to the board with a multimeter and I eventually got the programmer to recognize the PIC chip after about 10 soldering attempts of the MCLR pin using thin solder and a very fine solder tip. Having damaged miniscule IC pins on delivery doesn't help either. If you miss a small bend on one of these pins, it can create a solder short to the adjacent one and is somewhat difficult to repair, and removing the chip from the board is a pain as well. The circuit board tracks are so small that they can peel off the substrate quite easily if one or more pins decide to stick. I also added a picture of the 97 print head and ribbon cable. I don't know if it is normally attached to the flat side of the actual metal part of the print head or just sits loose like in the image. I thought if it has started to peel away I will have to put a small clip on it to stop it eventually tearing at the bottom. I think I might take the rest of the day off Fun with programming next... :-) cheers Tony |
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