Mending my mistakes

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While I am not a king (inside joke for Spaniards only) I do make mistakes quite often. One of them was not to disconnect my RAMPS-controlled 3D printer from the computer and mains supply for a quick solder job (just one pin of heating resistor was loose just before starting a print ...). Unfortunately, my trustry JBC solder of the last twenty years was not properly isolated anymore and I had a big flash and all the house lights went down.

When I restored the power the computer was booting up happily, the printer power supply light was on but the printer was dead and the computer was unable to detect the printer anymore. All the lights on the board and on the Arduino Mega were off too and my system shown a warning message that USB port was disconnected for excessive power consumption: no good news at all, but at least I learned the USB port was not completely dead.

I removed the RAMPS board from the Arduino Mega, connected it to the USB cable and then the lights come back on, surprisingly RX and TX leds too. But my computer did not detect any connection or disconnection on the USB. Of course Arduino IDE was incapable of doing anything else. The board seemed dead. But I had lying on my desk an Sparkfun FTDI Basic board, and when I connected the RX and TX and GND pins to my USB powered Arduino Mega I was able to upload the Blink test program and it worked. That proved the ATMega  microcontroller was not dead. So I decided to replace the FTDI chip, something I have never done before. The process was quite straightforward:

Fist I took an old Arduino board from my junk box:
Next I used a heat gun to heat up the FTDI chip area and when I thought it was warm enough I turned the board upside down and gravity did the rest:
I could not do the same with my Mega board as many other SMD components were close to the damaged FTDI chip, so I use some tweezers to pull from the chip while I heated it up with the heat gun (this is likely a better way):
Being careful of not confusing the damaged and the savaged FTDI chip I took the latter and I let it rest on the Mega board while heating it gently till I could see the chip seating in its place while the solder became liquid again (unfortunately I damaged some of the pins of the digital inputs header):
The Arduino Mega board is now back to life and after diagnosing a couple of damaged Pololu drivers in the RAMPS board I hope everything would be back to square one soon.

What is no longer with us and it is gone for good is my good old soldering iron. 

Note to self: Remember to power down everything you plan to solder, even if it is just tiny bit.




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