Knock knock...who's there...Mister...Mister who?
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16-12-2022 6:17pm#1
Well the Mister Multisystem of course!
Ok, this thread will be broken up into two sections. The first part will be me trying to fix a badly mangled DE10 Nano that I got from @o1s1n (pleasure meeting you again good sir, been a good few years!), and the second part, will be about consolising the Mister experience with a Mister Multisystem. Anyway, onwards...
^^ This is the mangled DE10. Its USB port has been ripped off, taking the traces completely with it. There's nothing left to patch wires to or rebuild the solder pads, utter destruction.
^^ Holding the PCB against light like this, you can just about make out the traces from the USB chip. So I figured, if I can expose the traces and hopefully even the test pads, then I stand some chance of being able to get a molecule of solder onto the board...and that'll let me get cables soldered to the board.
^^ Ok, we're off to a decent start. The top two pins on the left are the two data pins I need to get wire onto. The chip legs are just out of the question to solder to, you'd need more specialised equipment than what I have here and some serious magnification to boot....so the two left most circular copper test points are the data pins, and the left-most larger silver pad is the 'sense' pin, to determine which USB OTG mode the system uses....those three are the critical pins. After that, I just need to source 5v and ground on the board, which is a LOT easier to find. Thanks to @The Last Bandit for the sanity check on the pins too, very much appreciated.
^^^ Ok, so my idea was to grab this OTG extension cable, and strip the micro-b end off of it, and hardwire the female end of it directly to the DE10. I stripped the cable here, and just sanity-checked the pins on it, to be absolutely sure what pin is what (didn't want to cause any further damage by wiring it up all wrong!)
In the end, I didn't bother with this particular cable, and instead used the one that came with the Multisystem itself - the reason being, space. There's no room in the case to have x2 female USB headers, and then a patch cable joining them. You'll see what I mean later on! Same process of stripping the cable and checking pinouts though.
^^ The Mister Multisystem. It consolises the DE10 and Mister experience, by including all the necessary breakouts on one console shaped board (USB, Network, Ram, Snac, Scart, etc etc.) Wonderful design I must say!
^^ The DE10 in place. You can see where the cutout in the board is, that's where the DE10's usb cable connects to the Multisystem...and the label with 781 on it, just above that on the DE10 that's where the ripped off header should be....so there's very little room to be coiling cables up etc, they need to be as short as possible without putting strain on the DE10.
^^ Another picture to illustrate how tight this all is, and this is the cable I later snipped and used to connect to the DE10.
^^ Ok, getting back to the repair. I just about got a tiny blob of solder onto the three pads I needed. I can't emphasise how small these are, they're smaller than most wires actually are. So getting regular wire directly onto these solder blobs isn't a good idea, they're very likely going to short out on something.
^^ These three cables are actually .5mm enamel wire. It's internally conductive if you expose the ends of it, but non conductive on the exterior which means it's perfect for this repair. The solder blobs took thank god, not pretty, but you can barely even see them with the naked eye....I got quite lucky here....yolo moment.
^^ The original pads were completely gone, meaning I'd no way to rebuild the solder points. This forced me to bring the enamel cable off of the board, because I needed to keep these strands as straight as possible so as not to detach them from my solder blobs. This isn't ideal, I'd have preferred keep it all ON the board, but the risk of shorts, combined with how small this board is, meant it was just too risky.
^^ 5V test pad, and Ground point fluxed and prepped for cable. I used no clean liquid flux for everything here also.
^^ 5V and Ground connected, and brought down to the business end. So there's my x5 missing connections back, I just need to get the USB cable soldered onto them now.
^^ Wires soldered to appropriate connections, and insulated up to prevent shorts.
^^ I added another blob of hot glue, because at this point I really don't want any of this to move and short anything out.
^^ Installed onto the Multisystem board. Cable length is just nice, no stress/pressure on any of the soldering. At this point though, I'm several hours in, and just not confident about it working. Not because I've done anything wrong, just because I don't know what other damage has been done to the board when the traces/port were broken off.
^^ Time to bite the bullet and test it.....ok, it powers up anyway, that's at least something positive.
^^ It's also powering the controller....hmm....heart rate increasing at this point....
^^ Display looks good....so the big question....will my controller actually work and let me choose cores/games...
^^ Holy ****....Holy actual ****....it works, wow, I'm genuinely amazed it works.
^^ How I felt doing the soldering work...
^^ How I feel now 😎 Absolutely thrilled, and this is a milestone repair for me given the tiny size. I'd never have managed this when I was modding/repairing years ago, so I credit the many YouTube videos that showed me the proper way to do this type of work. Buying decent tools and supplies was a game changer too.
Ok, lets consolise this bad boy and finish it off....
Post edited by Inviere on8
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Ok, time to place the Multisystem into its 3D printed shell.
^^ The Mister Multisystem shell. I chose the grey one, there's white and black too. I felt grey looked more 'console-like', and indeed it looks great in person.
^^ Nuts, bolts, accessories, etc etc
^^ Sd-card support, reset button, and power switch all in place.
^^ Mister buttons in place
^^ Included fan screwed into place.
^^ Multisystem then slides into the bottom half of the shell. Perfect fit, really impressed.
^^ Front USB panel in place
^^ Rear IO panel in place....you can see the range of IO here on the Multisystem, it's a super impressive board with a LOT of flexibility.
^^ The instructions recommend the 3.3v header for the fan, unless you live in a hot environment.
^^ Top covers in place, almost there now.
^^ Snac port cover in place. I'm without a doubt going to add the MT32 Pi adapter cart in here at a later stage.
^^ Time to test again. Another nail biting moment because I had to take the DE10 back out in order to remove the metal posts from it, and use the printed posts from the case. It powers up, lights on, fan spinning....but can I still control it?
^^ Absolutely splendid, not a bad few hours work at all!
Post edited by Inviere on6 -
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Very minor update to the above DE-10 repair...I was doing some upgrades on the whole Mister Multi today, and the hot glue really done a s**t job of holding down the three enamel wires (doesn't it always!) They ALL lifted, requiring me to attempt to do the repair once again. I needed to change things this time though, and I obviously needed something a lot more secure.
^^ I cut a tiny piece of breadboard, and soldered it to one of the defunct pads on the DE10 (the one on the far left.) Using solder to anchor the board to the DE10 means there's now not going to be any movement or stress on the enamel wires, no matter how much movement I make with the USB cable.
^^ Very hard to picture something this small, through an optical lens, with a phone...but you can get the jist of it.The middle of the three enamel cables shown above had actually come away from its pad in this picture, I fixed that once I noticed it.
All back working again thank god. I wasn't very confident of the repair because with the breadboard in place, it was incredibly hard to see and manoeuvre the needle tipped soldering iron around. Somehow, I managed to get the correct connections in place. Just as well, as I'd the Terasic site open and ready to drop money on a new DE10!
Anyway, there'll be a new thread to show the upgrades once I'm done. This repair cost me a good chunk of time, so will have to finish the upgrades maybe next weekend.
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