DMG, GBC in progress

[chestylarue]

Hey yall, so I'm in the process of working on a a custom backlight DMG and also trying to frontlight my GBC at the same time. After lurking a bunch I'll try and be as to the point as possible.

Ive hit a snag on probably the hardest part. The first try at this mod the small ribbon to the frontlight panel was soldered in one big clump, so all of the contacts were touching, and the ground and voltage wires were in the same clump of solder. I could hear sound coming from the GBC, but the screen was blank. The second time I made sure to keep the ground and voltage contacts to the frontlight ribbon cable separate, thought I had it, and now the GBC wont even turn on. Upon opening the GBC again, it tore

Should I just obtain another SP frontlight module and make sure to keep the metal contacts in place, and solder correctly and hope that it works? Or should I obtain a SMT LED and go that route. As you can tell from my pic, its minuscule and i doubt I could solder it correctly. Is it possible I damaged the GBC mobo from manhandling it and soldering it so many times etc?

After more or less successfully installing a backlight on the DMG using nonfinites kit, my finished result is so:

I'm assuming I wasn't gentle enough with the LCD and damaged it? because It was fine before I started on this mod.Is there a way to either fix this LCD? I heard read you can heat up the ribbon cable. Or just try again on another DMG.(I have 2 more)


This is the shell im making for the DMG, its Hello Kitty themed as you can tell. Lol.

 

[Ishwhale]

I can answer both your questions.
For the CGB, the same thing happened to me (ripping the ribbon cable). I trashed it. The two contacts on the ribbon cable shouldn't have been one clump of solder, they are supposed to be separate. I dunno how it even worked while they were bridged. It IS possible to splice the ribbon cable and solder the traces. It isn't very probable though, I was not successful, and from what I am gathering about your skill level (no offense intended) you would be unsuccessful as well.
For the DMG, what you have there is a flax load of dead lines. They are easy to fix though, just might be time consuming. At the base of the lcd there will be a black bar made of rubber. Peel that off and some gross brownish looking paper will most likely come off the black rubber, peel the nasty paper adhesive off too. the ribbon cable will be exposed. Simply use your soldering iron to heat up the ribbon cable in that area that is now exposed and you'll see the lines flicker in and out. It'll take a while cause there are so many, more will appear before they start to disappear. Just have patience and work with it until they are all gone. Afterward, you don't need to put the rubber back, just toss it.

Hope that helps! I can help with any other questions you might have.

 

[R00man]

You could actually just solder directly to the SMD. Also if you cant don't toss the panel, you can use it later on.

 

[Mako321]

Use the panel and replace the LED, you don't need that same crap one.