Soldering

I assumed that the Commodore 1581 was failing because of a bad WD1772 IC (as documented in Part I). So I ordered a WD1772 replacement + the IC socket, I developed some basic desoldering skills, watched some desoldering videos, and also got a cheap desoldering iron from Radio Shack: So, I removed the board from the Commodore 1581 and started to desolder the IC. To my surprise the $11-buck desolder iron worked pretty well. I was able to remove all the solder from the the pins in a few minutes. The desolder iron just takes some time to reach the needed temperature, but besides that, it seems to be a great tool for occasional desoldering tasks (a hobbyist desoldering iron cost more than $250)

I’m good at software engineering, but in electronics, I’m a newbie. Nonetheless, I find electronics fascinating. Last year I did the first basic tutorials with Arduino, then I played a little bit with Raspberry Pi and CI20 (technically not really electronics). And this year, I built a very simple circuit to connect the RGBI output of my Commodore 128 to VGA… I have been using breadboard, so no soldering, no PCB, or anything like that. ...