Repairing the Commodore 1581 floppy disk drive. Part 2

Sun, 19 Jun 2016 11:20:16 +0000

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 and 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 pins in a few minutes.

Soldering, what could go wrong?

Sun, 12 Apr 2015 05:03:26 +0000

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.

Soldering on RETRO.MOE

Repairing the Commodore 1581 floppy disk drive. Part 2

Soldering, what could go wrong?