In the epic conclusion to my lackluster announcement around a month ago, my drawing tablet is actually dead now. Me and my uncle got some soldering paste since the solder and iron tips he had were too big for those little port pins, and just earlier tonight we tried using that to solder a new port in place. It worked great and honestly if you ever need to solder something, getting soldering paste is the easy way to go as long as you have a heat gun, but in my tablet's case it just worked too good.

We soldered the pins first, and that was simply just slapping some paste on the trace and mount points where the board is supposed to connect to a port, settling the port down into position, and then hitting it with heat from below until the solder paste burned off it's flux and melted into nice and neat little beads that did all the work of connecting the pins to the trace with no cross-pin bridging. Once it had cooled down however, we started fucking around with it before applying more solder to securely anchor it to the mounting points, and when my uncle tried to plug the cord into the port it just snapped off, which I really can't blame him for because it had looked so stable and well moored that we both thought it was fine. At first we both thought that it had ripped the pins off the port until my uncle noticed that the port still had it's pins and I looked at the board with my nearsighted gremlin eyes and noticed that the trace circuitry for the three middle pins was just completely gone. In case this has all been confusing misuse of terms I don't understand very well, this is essentially like trying to dock a boat, tying all the knots right, and then watching as the boat gets hit by a wave and rips 60% of the dock off it's little dock pole support things as the whole mess drifts further out to sea and sinks.

If this kind of thing happened in a factory for just about any electronic, they would just scrap the board for parts. Trying to fix it at this point would be nigh impossible with my current resources and even with the tools, materials, and understanding to fix it, it wouldn't be worth it since it's just a $50 drawing tablet I got mildly sentimental for.

I should have a new one of the same model by the end of the week, and then I can once again curse the world with my lackluster artwork in digital form. I can do traditional style, I just prefer digital because of all the tricks and shortcuts it offers, that and the fact that I'm a recluse that can't get the nerve to draw traditional around other people because it's so much harder for me to hide how terrible my stuff is.