Are there any tricks for connecting to a pin that is broken off flush with an IC body? I tried to solder a tiny wire to the nearly invisible nub but couldn't do it (0.8mm pitch).
I was trying to diagnose what appeared to me to be an odd hardware issue and temporarily lifted an IC pin from the PCB trace. The pin snapped off flush with the IC when I tried to bend it back down to resolder it. The kicker is that shortly after I did this I discovered that all along the problem had been a bug in my test software.
So... any sneaky tricks? Or is this IC (and board) something to feed to the garbage can?
You can drill or grind away the plastic on top of the pin that is inside the chip.
For example the ATmega328P in a DIP-28 package is mainly inner metal of the pins, and the actual chip is in the middle.
Koepel:
You can drill or grind away the plastic on top of the pin that is inside the chip.
Thanks, that's essentially what I just did. This was on an Atmega328 TQFP-32. I ended up excavating a little bit of the plastic with an exacto knife to expose just enough metal to make it possible to get a whisker of wire to stick. After all the cooking of it I just did with my cheap soldering iron I'm amazed this worked.
It's not an expensive part or board, but it saved me some time having to build a new one.
Wawa:
:o First you drown your Arduino, and now you mutilate it.
That's no big deal, I mutilated a new Raspberry Pi model B with a pillar drill by accident!
Carved half the IO pin headers flat to the board... Written off basically. Why couldn't
they use M3 mounting holes in the first place?
I suppose this could be a fun topic: "What have you destroyed?"
My very first Arduino project had an OLED display and a GPS. I turned the board upside down one day to cut a trace and pressed so hard that I cracked the glass on the OLED, severing the traces to the controller. No big deal, I had another OLED. I decided to test that one first on a breadboard and attached Vcc and Gnd backwards. Poof! There went a second display within minutes of the first. Shortly thereafter I discovered that I'd also mechanically damaged the GPS, probably the patch antenna, as it could no longer obtain a fix.
Ever blown the "integrated fuse" on a circuit board? You might know them as "traces" . They glow red hot and then break like a fuse when you put ~34v (8s3p LiPo with 5A fuses on each series stack - which also blew) through them...
I've had similar problems with circuits built on stripboard/veroboard. The tracks are thinnest as they pass the widest part of the holes. Currents of an amp or more can cause a blow at these points. The trick is to put a thick layer of solder along any high current tracks, covering the holes.
I've had good luck soldering some pin back on nothing really small, Some pdips the worst thing I blew up was a red led I was using a lm317 as current driver problem is it didn't go low enough so it shot a amp into the led
it looked like a light bulb glowing till it popped. The dumbest thing I did was with a 16x2 lcd I wasn't working and I checked every pin to see where I could of been wrong I checked all 14 pins and the backlight 2 so I checked all of the 16 but I only checked 14 for pin to pin shorts and figured the backlight pin to be good cause then had the right voltage well pin 15 was shorted to pin 14 and it was a hair line short but I should of checked for voltage on the pins not just pin shorts. Got a nice lcd with just black boxes now.
I've had chunks blown off the top of DIPs when 12V was accidentally supplied to a 5V rated VCC pin. Nice little bang! Haven't done that since college tho.
. They glow red hot and then break like a fuse when you put ~34v (8s3p LiPo with 5A fuses on each series stack - which also blew) through them...