This tutorial is for people have little to no experience soldering with electronics. I wish there was a guide like this before I started JTAG'ing, it could have saved me a perfectly good JTAG. (Oh well, it was a zephyr anyways) First, lets run through many of the common mistakes people make when soldering for the first time. 1.) Having a dirty iron -Having rust and misc. melted materials on your iron will severely impact the functionality of it. If you are using a fairly new iron that doesn't have that much gunk on it, use sandpaper to clean it off and get the shiny tip back. If you have loads of it, grab a pair of scissors and start scraping away. This part it absolutely necessary. You will not be able to JTAG your console without cleaning your iron at least once! 2.) Using bad solder -There are different types of solder out there, and others preform better for electronics than others. The recommended solder for this sort of work is 60/40 silver. It is very common and you can find it at radioshack, along with everything else you will need to JTAG your console. 3.) Misplacement of resistors on setup -This seems to be another common problem. Some people try to put there resistors in some weird fashion that makes absolutely no sense at all. The method I highly recommend is putting your resistors in the JTAG port directly on the motherboard. 4.) Using horrible wire -A lot of people end up melting there DB-25 points because the can't get the wire to get in there stably. It is very important that you use nothing else besides a high quality, fine copper wire. This wire won't bend back incredibly easily when you are trying to get it into a hole, and have a 'stabbing' property which is useful for holding it in place in the port while the solder is melting. So now that you have eliminated most of the potentially fatal errors of soldering, lets get down to the instruction. Materials needed for proper soldering: Soldering Iron (derp) 60/40 Silver Solder Copper Wire Resin Core flux (Make sure it's resin core, anything else will screw up your board.) Now that you have your materials, you are ready to take an iron to your exploitable board. Make sure that you have a good workspace set up and go ahead and plug in your iron. While it is heating up take apart the console so you are working with the motherboard only, and it isn't in the metal chasis. Make sure that you discharge all static electricity before touching the motherboard. Keep something metal next to your workstation and touch it immediately before or while you are establishing contact with the board. Take a q-tip and dunk it lightly in your resin core flux. Rub it under (bottom of the board) the JTAG points you will be soldering, and also on your diodes and wires if you want. Take the board and put it vertically on your workspace, resting on the usb panel. (If you are right handed you want the bottom of the board to be facing right, else left.) Make sure that you cut the stems of your diodes so they are fairly short so you can push it into the port without it bending. After that, use your left hand to push the diode into the port while using your iron to melt the solder (there is already a little solder on the board, DO NOT APPLY NEW SOLDER FOR THIS PART) on the bottom side of the board. If done correctly, your diode should slide right in and you would have started out with a clean soldering job. Repeat the previous step for all of the diodes, and once you are done with that take your copper wire, cut it down to size (you want about 4-6 inches between the JTAG port and the LPT port on your computer, more or less) and strip the ends with a tool of your choice. If you don't own wire strippers, use nail clippers or scissors. This part can be a little tricky for beginners, because it is relatively hard to solder the points in your DB-25 part without melting the plastic to a point where you just need to start over. Anyways, take your iron and dab a medium size ball on the end if it with your solder. If you have 60/40, it should stick to the iron and be simple to carry over. Stab the copper wire into the point and quickly rub the solder on the front part of it. When it cools you should have an incredibly stable connection that you shouldn't be able to rip out easy with all your might. Repeat until all of the wires are securely in your LPT port. Now, take the other ends of the wires you just soldered and wrap the appropriate ones around the appropriate diodes. Once they are tighly wrapped, take medium-large sized balls of solder and dab them over the connection. Repeat until all connections are coated in solder and securely in. The last thing you want it a wire to pop loose when you are dumping the last block! Now go run your nandpro command and go grab a cup of coffee. When it's done, dump it again and go grab another cup of coffee. When you come back to identical dumps, thank me and appreciate all your hard work. That is all you need to know (and then some) if you want to properly solder your JTAG points and not mess up any of your hardware.
