DIY Sunday: Soldering a Yahama PSR-160

I picked up a broken Yahama PSR-160 several years ago from a friend of mine for $5. It's on the lowend of the quality spectrum but I've always enjoyed picking out notes on a keyboard from time to time so I was happy to get it - even though it had obviously seen some better days.

The broken part was the fact that the speakers didn't work correctly, so I just plugged it into my old bass amp or used it as a MIDI keyboard. Anyways, it ended up getting tucked away in a closet for a while. I got it back out a few weeks ago to find that the MIDI function wasn't working. I thought it was the cable, so I bought a new one. No dice. Tried updating the drivers, no dice. No support available online except a really crappy user manual. Today I thought the hell with it and took the thing apart to figure out wtf was broken.



I followed the circuit board to try to find burned out transistors or anything, but couldn't find anything that appeared to be messed up. I finally managed to track it to a loose connection in the circuit board, using a poptop from a soda can, randomly linking transistors, etc. Anyways, it turned out the loose connection was right next to the MIDI port itself (it was actually kind of easy to find. So I busted out my soldering gun and made a little ghetto fix to the circuit board.


A bit of solder, 2 wire strands from an old length of speakerwire, and the fuckin keyboard works just like new. I'm pretty shitty at soldering, and my soldering iron sucks shit anyways, btw...so it is kind of a hack job but it works. (hey, it's a $5 keyboard). I even resoldered the connections to the internal keyboard speakers and now they work good too.