Hi, so for introductions, I have pretty little soldering experience. I’ve tried in the past with really bad flux and therefore failed badly, but otherwise I had a general idea of what to and not to do, based on what I read and heard online.

I took my Switch out and realized I had only two games for it, neither of which I’d played in at least 2 years. Considering the sad state of this console, and my reluctance to pay Nintendo anything, I decided… let’s mod the fucker to get some pirated games on this bitch. I decided to first pay someone to complete the modding, but because of the current prices of uSD storage (512 GB is like 100 USD) and my desire to learn shit, I did it myself. (Also I had a soldering iron already and it was dejected from years of abandonment…)

Most tutorials seem to use the PicoFly so that’s what I went with. The kit itself was about $15, plus another $10 for repoured (possibly fake) Kester 186 from an eBay seller that would probably bully me if I questioned the authenticity of this Kester 186. I already had a Ksger soldering iron (identical to the Quicko / Quecco) which is a cheap Chinese soldering station that came at a really good deal, plus it had a knife tip which I needed for the project. The PicoFly arrived a few days later using a shady shipping service called GoFo and came in a very light envelope, which made me irate since who dafuq ships fragile flex cables components in an envelope. It ended up being fine though, so I won’t actually berate the seller over it.

The disassembly itself was time-consuming, but not too difficult, taking me from around 1pm to 5pm. Most of that time was me spending extra care not to break anything. I know myself… I break things.

The rest of the afternoon, up until 8pm, was spent soldering on the tiny little flex cable. Now, this is where I genuinely wasn’t sure if I was going to succeed. I am not exaggerating when I say that the pads and resistors being soldered together are small. The image above is deceptive, because it was taken at a high magnification level on my phone. You have to get really close, even with a jeweler’s magnifying glass, and look at it from the right angle. I have poor vision when looking at things from 3 inches away, so this was really hard. I nearly messed up during the soldering several times, and had to reflow the same areas a few times just to make them adhere properly. My flux at some point burned into a black tar and made it impossible to see where the pads were, so I had to clean it up a few times. The main source of my frustrations were from the lack of a microscope, but I finally managed to form proper joints and after thorough inspection, they seemed good. Of course I also made sure to check the resistances to ground, which was about 20 ohms. One side of each resistor needs to be non-zero (20-30) in order for it to succeed.

Just some pictures from the cleanup. Afterwards I did a full wipedown of my outdoor station to remove lead contamination which was probably all over my hands. Always remember to wash your hands thoroughly.

Here’s the final result! Booted into the latest version of Hekate and am really excited. The install was extremely stressful and took me 8 hours to complete. However, I think it ended up being pretty clean and without any damage or cold joints. I might make a follow-up post about what I end up installing, though there doesn’t really seem to be a limit with CFW.