Awhile ago now I managed to "brick" my 3DS XL. At the time I was using a R4 3DS cart, which of course bricked my 3DS with the standard Gateway brick. I promptly fixed that and went back to playing my 3DS. But while playing Bravely Default I think my battery died (or I just had it in sleep mode) and when I came back to my 3DS it would boot but no longer be usable. I'll put a video up of what it does but essentially it boots up fine and looks like it's going to work but after a couple seconds it goes to the "An error has occurred" screen. (Here's the video http://youtu.be/KNJjm3uV_l8) So I figured maybe the NAND was corrupted so I went to work soldering it up like I had to when I fixed the Gateway brick. Then repeatedly tried to write the NAND unsuccessfully. So I re-soldered everything figuring that was it, still didn't work. I did that a handful of times until this. http://i.imgur.com/3clsUS6.jpg I managed to lift the pad and then when I tried to scrape a little bit back to solder onto the trace I bodged that too. Never solder late at night kids. As far as I've been able to figure out there isn't any alternate CLK point on the 3DS XL. Any recommendations on how to potentially fix this? If I can't fix it I'll either be selling it for parts or if someone thinks that they can fix it and wants to buy it feel free to say something.
Did you say you nicked the board and cut a trace? Welp, if you can try to rewire it somehow, your 3DS is a goner.
It looks like you ripped the trace out, if you get a dentist bit off ebay, you can carefully drill down until you get to shiny metal again. In the old days, when legs would break off a chip they would use acid to burn away until they got a trace again. I would recommend you buy one with broken screen(s) off ebay and swap the pcb. That or fill it with solder paste, and hope for the best when it melts.
It looks like you will have to remove the nand with a hot air or IR rework station to get to whatever is left of the trace. Then reball it and solder it again using the rework station, alot of work there.
I tried a couple of different things, including using a pogo pin I had from a different project. But in the end I couldn't get it to work :c I considered Helders' idea for a split second but my hot air station has been iffy lately so I decided to not even bother with it. Besides the difficulty and likelihood that I would just make it even less usable then it is now. So I sold it on eBay and can now check this project off my list.
If you sand off a little bit of the green etch on the circuit board by that broken trace with some sandpaper and then use some steel wool for conductivity, you can get some metal to be able to solder to. Just flow some solder from the pin to the part that you sanded. That will make a new connection.
