Dreamcast Death Whine

I just tried to swap the LED on my Dreamcast, but I kind of screwed it up. That is, I managed to lift the solder pads off the board (long story, but I've got fairly good at NOT having that happen any more, so this was a spectacular failure). I tried to wire the LED back up by scraping at the PCB, checked all the continuity and everything, made sure it was all linked up correctly to ground and the ribbon cable pin that the LED links to (+5v). Everything was fine and the LED was lighting up with my multimeter. Now when I plug in the Dreamcast and turn it on, I get a high-pitched whine (seems louder than when the unit is running, but it's hard to tell without all the other noise) and no other signs of life. I'm really scared to leave it on for more than a few seconds and only tried it a few times before I just unplugged it all.

I should also point out that the first LED I tried putting in ended up getting fried (it probably died from soldering iron heat in an attempt to get it out after I did some pretty stupid things to hold it in place, which lead to the lifted solder pads when I tried to remove it) but the Dreamcast still worked (just no LED), and before I realised it was fried, I'd tried soldering it to the same points as the even newer LED, so those scraped traces don't seem like they should be a problem.

So what's the deal? Did I short something? Did I fry something?

Here's a photo (yes, there is some flux that still needs cleaning):



EDIT: Tried my Dreamcast with a different controller board. It turns on, starts to boot the game (shows Dreamcast logo), fan doesn't spin, then the thing shuts off. So, better than last time, but it seems the PSU is buggered. Considering how ridiculously expensive Dreamcasts are here, I'm pissed. And I haven't done anything, to my knowledge, to cause such a problem. Goddammit. I could try my controller board in the other Dreamcast I have (not mine, FYI), but if it caused the problem in the first place, I don't want to destroy a second Dreamcast, especially since it isn't even mine.

EDIT 2: Haven't actually tried my PSU with the other Dreamcast, but I measured it with my multimeter and couldn't get any resistance/voltage reading from the 12v pin, although continuity on it appears fine. 3.3v and 5v pins are fine, as far as I can tell. Checked LED again and it still seems fine (and lights up when measuring correctly with multimeter). I emailed gamedoctorhk about a replacement PSU since the site doesn't have any 220-240v ones listed, so I guess we'll see if that amounts to anything. Still hoping my terribly-done mod didn't cause the problem in the first place.

 

I would suggest that you somehow destroyed the PSU and that high pitched whining is somewhere in the PSU. Please post pictures of the damage, and your repairs. It's possible during your scraping your did something else. Also did you use the same rated LED as the one that originally came with it? Also, you should pick up whats called Solder Braid. Basically you put the braid over the solder or contact you want to remove solder from, putting the hot spot of the iron on the braid, wait 5-10 seconds, and the braid should "suck" the solder up and out of the joint. This should leave you with a nice hole you can put the new LED, capacitor, resistor, etc you are replacing. Keep the pictures flowing brother!

 

Thanks for your reply.

The photo I posted is the best I have right now, but there's no visible damage to the PSU, including obvious things like caps.

As for desoldering wick/braid, I don't have any right now (long story) but I'll be getting some. I have a solder sucker, though, which did the job. I'll need wick to fix it up if my hack job didn't fix it, though.
How I removed the vias is kind of embarrassingly stupid. Basically, I put the LED in place, then bent the legs to hold it in place whilst soldering. However, I hadn't checked the direction of the LED before putting it in (you know, the thing you should ALWAYS do), so because it didn't work, I tried to change its orientation (which resulted in the mess I made). When I eventually found a video that showed the correct orientation, I believe it showed that I had it correct from the beginning. Therefore, the LED was probably incorrect. I'll have to look up the specific ones I got (just got them form eBay), but my guess is that the Dreamcast provides 5v to the LED and mine was 3.3v, hence why the first one died. I've found conflicting reports of how much voltage the DC gives the LED, but a 3.3v model is still capable of supplying the LED with 5v if wired correctly, so I can't guess without measuring it myself (which I obviously can't do right now).

 

Depending on how much a new PSU will cost you, I will suggest looking at a PicoPSU. It is much smaller, and involves SOME work, but isn't too intimidating. There is also a guide for this. You just need to make sure you have the LED orientated correctly. Most of the time the longer leg on the LEDs is the Positive + while the shorter leg is the Negative -. I have ordered a purple LED, and will be doing this mod soon, so I will make a guide and if you don't get yours done before, you can follow it. Definitely try to get some pictures up so we can see the damage done by the scrapping, as this could have grounded traces, etc.

 

No idea on a new PSU cost yet. There are no 240v ones on gamedoctorhk but I'm waiting for them to email me back (they have a thing on their website that says to do so if they don't have the PSU you want, after all). There's probably a delay with Chinese New Year.

I could totally look into building a picoPSU, but I don't know how good of an idea that is, considering I've never worked on PSUs or indeed things that plug directly into mains. I guess I've gotta start somewhere, but I'm not sure if this is where I should be starting.

The problem with the LED wasn't that I didn't know which side was which - that's the easy part. I just didn't know which point was positive and which was negative on the board itself because I forgot to check before removing the LED. Here are the specific LEDs I bought: http://www.ebay.com/itm/400813240633
I'm not familiar with a lot of the different ratings for LEDs, other than voltage. As I said, though, I'm not sure what voltage the Dreamcast's LED actually is, because I've seen a bunch of conflicting reports. If it's 5v, then that's why the first one fried (the new one still works, but I'm not sure why, since the PSU should still be supplying enough power for the LED to turn on, but it doesn't).

As for photos, I don't plan on opening my Dreamcast back up for a bit, at least until I have a PSU of some kind ready for it, but if you click on the one I provided in the first post, you can zoom in on it and see the scraping I have done. Next to the left solder blob, there are three scratches - two on the top trace and one on the bottom, the latter being what the solder blob is covering and why it's so big (you can see some small scratches around the bottom). The right blob of solder is covering the trace where I scraped - it's literally just a little bit scraped off by the via, then soldered to (you can probably see where the left solder blob "extends" to cover the trace where it was scraped).

Considering that I'm unsure of how I even damaged the PSU in the first place (it was always discharged, for instance), I don't know if my controller board is also a problem or not. As I said before, I could try it with a good PSU, but I would really rather not end up with two dead PSUs.