nesdev.org

i was desoldering this board and accidentally messed up:



is it still usable or fixable?

That's not a big deal. Just repair the broken trace and make sure there are no shorts. I think radio shack sells a pen for such a task. That or just carefully solder a piece of wire across the gap.

Or rather than try to bridge the gap, find another point that the trace leads to that's easy to solder to. For the other end you could scape the solder-mask off of the top of the connector pin and wire to that, but if you put it back in a case you'll need to cut a little notch in the case.

Here's a page I made many years ago, describing how to repair a broken circuit board (I once repaired a computer keyboard like this with a crack all the way down the center). The technique is the same for bridging over a broken trace (if ever you are intentionally breaking a trace with plans to later re-bridge it, do it next to a solder hole so you don't have to use any wire to re-bridge it).

Repairing Broken Circuit Boards

In summary, use a single strand from stranded copper wire and scratch the coating off the circuit trace to solder on to it.

Also, don't overheat the trace or it'll burn off the board.

is this the pen:

CircuitWriter

[Please post long URLs using the [url=] syntax. -- moderator]

Yes, I have one, it's sorta mediocre.