Well, it has been about eight years since I purchased my clone. I am ready to admit my two big mistakes while I was building the kit. I was too embarrassed to bring this up in the beginning, I was more so worried about the criticisms than the actual honest answers—I had a lot of confidence issues when I was 14. Well, I’m 22 now, and I’m way more confident in myself, soldering, and asking for help when needed (Note: I had a look at the pictures, and I have gotta say it’s gonna be tough to look).
Issue 1) What the heck happened? It is not the fisheye effect. My front panel LEDs appear to retreat into the case toward the center; however, it looks almost flush on the sides. Looking back at the instructions, I think I may have missed the step where I was supposed to put one of those plastic spacers in between the front panel and PCB, to prevent "PCB sagging," but I don’t 100% remember. Also, there are a couple of solder joints that are not making a good connection to the front panel PCB, so the "INTE" LED and "A8" LED have to be jiggled to stay on. I think I fixed one of the LEDs already, back in 2015. I believe it was the "D7" LED.
I will be fixing the LED issues soon. Overall, it might just be easier to take out the front panel, desolder all of the LEDs, buy a whole 36-piece LED set, and redo it properly. That said, I don’t see why I can’t just skip that spacer step and just mount the LEDs loosely until the whole front panel is mounted in that L-Bracket. After all that, I could just push them flush into the front panel and solder each one as I go (hopefully the LEDs flange out far enough to catch). Reduced warping tolerances would be an absolute worst-case scenario for this method. I would like to hear everyone’s input, especially our leader, the good man himself, as well. Feel free, to be honest, I can take criticism. Also, if you have any advice, it would be most appreciated. Overall, my excuse for the butchered soldering job was lack of experience. I will add that I redid most of the joints in 2015, so they look a lot better now than when these were taken.
Issue 2) in 2013, my understanding of the RS232 was established to me from the physical connector rather than the protocol standard. I didn’t know that they were separate. This was one of my hardest gremlins to resolve after I finished the kit. I did not have the proper tool to wire together the RS-232 data cables and slot them into their Molex connectors—I didn’t even know there was a proper tool for them until about two years ago on a separate project for my car. I’m not quite sure if I had the wiring correct the first time I had the system set up, but I was definitely having intermittent connection problems due to my terrible “crimp” job.
I don’t know why I thought this was a good idea at the time, but I decided it was better to solder all the male pins straight to the wires (bypassing the Molex connectors) going to the DB-25 connector on the board. In hindsight, alligator clips would have been just fine. Well, this did two things: it fixed the intermittent connection problem to the terminal emulator, but it made those male Molex pins thicker, so if I wanted to go back to the female connector, it would be next to impossible to slip back on. This was the case when I decided to reverse my mistake in 2015. That said, I will be replacing the connectors Male and Female, and possibly purchasing some replacement DB-25 connectors (I think I wired the port up like a Null Modem, when it should have been 1 to 1.
As an improvement to the overall experience, and to slim the wire clutter down, I was thinking of using a Raspberry Pi Zero W with an RS-232 Serial Port. That way, I could SSH into the Pi, then MiniCom into "/dev/ttys0," thus a wireless console. I will keep the back connector and just run one of those flat ribbon cables out the back to make it easier to switch between the Pi and a traditional console. I will make use of that "AUX" switch jumper for the ATX mod and use it to power the Pi off. I can probably write a quick script with Python.