Ask HN: Your last soldering project
So, lets get this thread started :)
A little bit of background: I like soldering. A lot. It is - in some strange way - relaxing to me (i don't have to do it professionally; that very well may play a role...)
Maybe, just maybe, i (and you) find a new project worth doing via this thread...
So, my last soldering projects where:
- the Objective2 Headphone Amplifier -> http://nwavguy.blogspot.de/2011/08/o2-details.html
- Nintendo N64 RGB Mod -> http://retro-magic.de/N64_RGB_PAL (sorry for the german link)
What was your last soldering project?
Soldered some random crap (10-axis gyro/magnetometer/ accelerometer combo, a BT Serial module, an ultrasonic sensor and an arduino nano clone to a piece of perfboard and called it a robot :-)
Making the client software was the fun part though :-)
I enjoy soldering quite a bit. I'm an embedded software engineer so I sometimes have occasion to build prototype boards. I will order through-hole versions of microcontrollers for this even though the final products will have tiny surface-mount versions. Strictly speaking, I could do most of what I need to do on breadboards, but I have found it both useful and fun to transfer breadboarded circuits to stripboard. I work part of my week from home. At my office I have access to lighted stereo microscopes and other expensive tools for surface-mount soldering, but at home I just have a couple of irons, a Hakko and Radio Shack. At work we use lead-free solder; at home I use old-school lead 60/40. I have tried to switch to lead-free solders at home but I hate them; the poor wetting and the way they burn up the iron tips. Leaded solders are very forgiving; often times you don't have to get a blob of solder perfectly placed, and it just flows into the right shape. Lead free, not so much, at least in my experience. I know I can do things with extra flux and all that, but with leaded solder I generally don't even need to apply extra flux to get good connections.
The last project I built for work was a little development board built around and Atmel microcontroller. The last project for fun was a flashing LED Christmas Tree kit. I have built a number of those and I am teaching my kids to build them. I also sometimes make other little LED toys for my kids, things with 555 timers or programmable unijunction transistors and RGB LEDs.
My skills at surface-mount soldering are still pretty laughably bad although using the tools in my office I have managed to solder some tiny surface-mount resistors. One of my co-workers has been mentoring me a bit in how to do that. It would be pretty much impossible to do in my home office without the stereo microscope and Weller with a super-tiny tip.
40 pin GPIO header to a Pi Zero. That was enough;)