Game Advance SP - SMD component repair
The next patient arrived, once again, from the wonderful country of Japan.
I regret not writing down the postal office details from the envelope, as this would allow me to ponder again on the whereabouts of this game boy color. However, I received it well before I had any intention of writing this blog. All I can tell you is that it arrived from Western Japan and sent to me by an eBay seller called samuraikomachi.
This game boy is a special one, not only because it arrived with a thank you note and a little japanese candy that put a day’s worth of smile on my face (Thank you, komachi-san! ), but because this was the first game boy that I received for repairs, and it was the one that opened my eyes to how wonderful these little devices are.
I have a confession to make. I had first bought this patient, marked as “junk” and “for parts” exactly for the said purpose. I wanted to reuse the housing and a part of the pcb in a project of my own.
Nevertheless, I had sworn to myself that I will not deprive the world of a perfectly working game boy. Soon I learned, that a perfectly working gameboy is simply defined by how far you are willing to go to fix it. And so without further ado, here is the patient. A Japanese berry (fuchsia) game boy color.
These great little devices were first released on October 1998 in Japan. Berry variation is one of the original colors released on that day. The wikipedia states: "The Game Boy Color was a response to pressure from game developers for a more sophisticated handheld platform, as they felt that the Game Boy, even in its latest incarnation, the Game Boy Pocket, was insufficient."
A game boy is not a game boy without The Kid. And yes there was one that held this patient. Held it as often as he dropped it I might add. The screen and the case are quite roughed up, scratches and bumps all over.
Removing the battery cap, we see ... wait The Kid removed it for us already! Permanently …
I presume it is somewhere under the couch of Ojiisan, fully camouflaged in dust. Hidden, like a ninja, from young sticky fingers, and old tired eyes alike. It lies there, flat to the ground, holding its breath. For the last eighteen years, it has been planning its escape, imagining the moment when its lungs will burst with a loud shriek and it will fly through the room and out into the wild. From then on, making its own way, living by its own rules, afraid of no one.
The reality of the battery cap’s existence? Too scared to move, paralysed in its disguise. Governed by the routine of its dusty life of laying low. One day, the couch will be removed. The cap will be picked up by a house mover’s dirty fingers and sent on an epic journey down the trash bin. From then on, it will be a wild ride, surrounded by banana peels, wild younger recyclable materials and indecipherable news papers. A last wild trip to the land fill.
But enough about the ninja battery cap, it will remain there, waiting for a better day. Lets get cracking!
Severe battery leakage on the contacts means bad news. More often than not the leakage spreads throughout pcb and damages traces and components. Often the game boy will not turn on in this state. I guess most sellers would rightfully mark such devices as trash. But fear not, Berry Fuchsia, we will save your life! You’ll be all right!
The picture above is after I cleaned up all the acid. Unfortunately I did not make a snap with all the blue crystally stuff all over, but here are shots corrosion from another game boy color I am fixing. Note how far select and start pads are from the actual battery contacts.
First note, battery acid is poisonous. Do not touch it with your fingers, use gloves preferably. Do not rub your nose or eye while cleaning it. Wash your hands when you are done. You have been warned.
In truth it is much less dangerous than it sounds, but it is best to be cautious. Firstly lets remove the pcb and disconnect it from the screen.
I use a plastic tool to pull up the clips that hold the screen ribbon cable, as seen in the picture above. You can use a screw driver or your nails, but be careful. You are but one slip away from damaging the cable and needing a new LCD. Yes, as far as I know the cable cannot be repaired or replaced.
Now unscrew the three philips screws holding the PCB in place and remove it. Don’t forget to be careful with the battery acid parts, those gloves would come in handy now. (And no eye rubbing!)
The first rule of fixing this game boy is: Neutralize the battery acid! And we will do this using baking soda!
Make sure that no batteries or power source is attached to the pcb before cleaning. What I like to do is take a shot glass and put some baking soda into it, then add a little bit of water. Stir a few times with the back of the spoon. Say: “Berry, let’s cook!”. Now, get ready to use the gooey paste you've created. You can get rid of the excess water on top of the soda paste.
The trick is now to apply the paste to the battery contact without dripping water on the pcb. I tend to use q-tips to apply the paste to the battery contacts and leave it there for a few minutes, then scrub it off with another clean q-tip.
Clean-up with some isopropyl alcohol and you should have your shiny contacts back. Sometimes the acid damage to the contacts destroys the chrome finish. Nothing to be done, the contacts won’t shine, but should still work. In my case this is the result:
It is not perfect, but it will do. If you really want to clean them better you could desolder the battery contacts, but that does not go without risk of damaging the pcb unless you are very confident of your desoldering skills. I would say don't fix it if it ain't broken.
Now lets get to those acid leaks on the pcb. This is a bit tricky. You should not apply any water on the pcb for obvious reasons, yet you need to neutralise the acid. What I like to use are two, you guessed it, q-tips!
Dip one lightly into the soda to absorb some water but don’t pick up too much paste as the crystals might scratch the pcb. Dip the second q-tip into the isopropyl alcohol. Now first rub a acid off a pad with the soda water q-tip, then clean up with the alcohol drenched one.
I’m sure there might be better ways to do this, but so far this worked out fine. Some people like to use vinegar instead of soda, but I’d say that will create a sticky and smelly mess. Not to mention you might get it all over the pcb and short stuff out.
Now let the pcb dry for an hour or so to prevent any shorts.
Time to test! Reassemble the whole and use a fresh pair of batteries. Let’s see what works and what not.
Berry Fuchsia is churning out chip tunes once again! But wait, something is up with controls ...
Somehow Mr Wario is a bit confused and does not want to go left and up. Either that or this gameboy is locked onto the location of its ninja battery cap. It wants to be reunited with it, dearly.
Kid, you couldn’t have made it this easy, could you? Berry, back to the operating table!
First off you can find bigger pictures of snaps below, here and here. This might help you to locate the area on the PCB that we will be talking about.
Having taken Berry apart, lets look at how controls work.
As an example, look at the UP control pad. As you can see each pad consists out of two parts. The one designated with 0 is connected to ground (designated by the little upside down striped pyramid symbol). The second part of the control pad is connected by a copper trace that goes all the way up to the CPU. The copper pads 0 and 1 are disconnected, creating an open electrical circuit. When the UP button is pressed, those 0 an 1 pads are linked. The circuit now becomes closed and the electricity is conducted. This tells the CPU that the UP button was pressed and Mr Wario should now enter the black square of nothingness to appear in a new game tile. In our case, nothing happens. This means that even when pads 0 and 1 are connected by button press, the electrical circuit remains open. Somewhere along the copper trace towards the CPU there is one or several breaks.
How to find the break? For this we use the multimeter. First off, doublecheck that the meter is set to continiuty measurement and the electrodes are connected to the right ports. Now touch the black and red electrodes together and you should hear a loud and clear beep. You have created a closed circuit between the electrodes. Now let's move onto the PCB.
When measuring the continuity between two points on the PCB, it is important to remember that when you dont hear that beep, there can be multiple reasons for it. It is possible that the pads you are testing are not properly making contact with an electrode, try to wiggle them gently, try to touch the points a few times at different angles. If you still don't hear a beep, try it again. On the other hand if you do hear a beep, all is fine and you can move on to testing the next part.
We are trying to fix the UP pad so let's focus on the purple line. First off we want to check if the 0 pad is connected to the ground properly. For this we touch one electrode (doesn't matter red or black) to the 0 pad of the purple line and the other electrode to a ground point. The ground point that we use is designated by a white circle in the picture above. The multimeter beeps and we can move onto the next part. Next we measure the continuity between point 1 and 5 on the purple line. Wiggling the electrodes doesn't help, and after multiple times it's clear, there is a break in this segment. Measuring between points 5 and 2 produces a beep. That was an easy one, electricity is conducted all the way to the test pad 2, designated as P02 on the PCB, so the break is somewhere between point 2 and 1 on the purple line.
In similar manner we repeat the steps for the LEFT control pad on the red line. We find that here there are two breaks. One between points 2 and 1 and one between 3 and 2. So here we will need to fix two parts of traces.
A simple way to repair the breaks is to take a piece of electrical wire and solder it to bridge the breaks. We could solder a wire between 2 and 1 on the purple line and a wire between 3 and 1. While this is an easy and relatively safe fix, I prefer to try to fix the breaks with solder not to have loose wires hanging on the PCB. Please think for yourself what works best for you at this step.
My intuition is that battery acid leaks tend to happen around the parts of the copper trace that are in contact with oxygen, or in other words are in the open. Also the breaks are more likely to be closer to the battery contact, which is in fact right on the back of the control pad. In the pictures above you can see my (un)educated guesses for breaks of UP and DOWN buttons.
Now to fix the breaks without using wire, we need to uncover the copper trace. Take an exacto knife and do some very gentle, very very careful, scratchie-scratchie. Stop scratching as soon as you see copper.
Now, as you can see in the pictures, I started scratching at the UP pad side of the broken trace. However, having revealed the copper and tested for continuity it seemed to be fine at this end. Next I started to scratch at the P02 side and there it was. Lets clean everything up with isopropyl alcohol, then flux it up and flow some solder over the break.
Repeating the same procedure for the LEFT control pad, the breaks were found around the P01 pad on the PCB. This was a trickier solder job as the solder had to flow in two directions. So look what I have created! I have created a COLD SODER JOINT! What do we do about it? Well, I double checked everything with the multimeter and the trace seems fine again. Wilson, this joint will remain our little secret!
Now if you scratched a part of the trace that you shoudn't have you can conver it with nail polish to protect the copper. I have left mine out in the open for now. Here is a shot of the whole pcb after repair (and before flux cleanup):
It is that time again. Put everything together and see if we can crack this coconut!
Rejoice, Berry Fuchsia is in full operational condition again! And on this note we will end this adventure!
But not before we tell you that Berry has received a prostetic battery cap replacement in purple over the mail. He is very happy to be whole again, but sometimes ... at night .. he still thinks about his dusty ninja friend. If you have any comments on how things can be done better, if you (dis)like to have to read through such a long batch of text, or if you have found a fuchsia battery cap exceptionally skilled with pointy stars ... Please do write!
