Nintendo DS Lite Cartridge Slot repairs:
I’ve done a lot of DS Lite repairs and generally they have never really been worth the time or effort to work on considering how cheap they can still currently be obtained for, the many issues they can end up having and the comparatively high cost of replacement parts.
However, recently I got handed over two very nice condition DS lites:
Everything is working great apart from both of them have non working “SLOT 1” DS cartridge slots.
The deal here being if I can repair them I get to keep the black DS lite for myself.
Which I decided to take up as the only DS lite I had is actually the result of combining many trash free systems together to make one working system and even then I still had to use parts of a 3rd party shell casing to bring it all together.
So anyway, I bought 2 replacement DS cartridge slots from Zedlabs:
Turning over the Pink DS lite and removing the Dummy GBA Cartridge:
The Battery and two feet are removed:
Four Tri-wing screws and three Phillips screws have to be removed:
You can leave the screw in the center of the battery housing alone:
Gently you can now pry up/off the casing:
Close up of the cartridge slot we need to remove:
Because I do not want to remove the PCB fully and don’t have any need to try to save the cartridge slot, I decide to cut the pins to the rear of the slot to avoid having to use hot air:
Using solder wick I remove any excess solder from the cartridges ground solder tabs:
Using my solder iron to gently heat up these tabs I can now prise up the cartridge slot and remove it:
Since I cut the pins previously I now need to remove them with my soldering iron:
And with some more use of solder wick I clean up all the contacts:
The original DS cartridge slot (right) versus the new one:
Taking off the top shielding of the original slot we can see how badly mangled the original pins are inside:
The new replacement cartridge slot is now placed into position:
And soldered onto the PCB:
I find that unfortunately I can not close the casing of the DS Lite because of two black pieces of plastic sticking out of the back of the replacement cartridge slot:
So I trim these off:
After re-assembling:
Both are now fully working again.