Revived!

Somehow, after three days of failing over and over to get the damn solder to take to the contacts, I managed to get a solid connection and brought it back to the world of the living.



Getting the solder to stick was undoubtedly the most difficult part. The metal that's already on the board absolutely refused to melt despite having my self-igniting soldering iron on full blast. I don't know what its max temperature is, but I figured it would be hot enough to at least loosen the pre-existing solder. No luck. Despite that, I did manage to get the 60/40 .032" Rosin-Core solder to take, and routed the other ends of the wires to a 1.0mm x 3.9mm DC power connector. After that, I hot-glued the joints to help secure them. One quick tug would be enough to snap them right off otherwise.



For the red wire, I soldered it to the "top" (which is facing down in the photo) of the power connector on the board, since it was much easier to get the solder to stick to its exposed copper plating. The other two wires were the troublesome part, as I had to solder them to the actual connections in the board.




When I first tried to boot the device, it only stayed on for about three minutes before shutting off again and refused to boot afterwards. I later found out that I merely needed to let the battery charge for a bit. The light went from off, to red, to orange... And now it lives.



All that's left is to cut out a square in the back panel to make room for the mountain of hot-glue. After that, it should be good.

Holy shit.