March 28, 2005

Breathing lead

One of the many fun things about soldering components onto a wire wrap board.

We've done enough testing on the hardware for the smart synchronizer that we are ready to commit to solder. Up to now, we've been working with what looks like a bilious mass of spaghetti, piled on a breadboard and loosely held together with banana plugs. I'm actually quite amazed that it works at all.

For the past week, Mountain Girl and I have been getting together a schematic, verifying all the pinouts, and making notes about the synchronizer. Dr. Smith has even said he'll have a printed circuit board version of it made up, which will plug in to the FPGA development board and look all professional-like. If we give him all the design information tomorrow, we'll get the PCB…sometime after graduation? In the meantime, however, we need a stable prototype for more testing and development, so it's time for us to brush up our lame soldering skills.

We really only did soldering in one intro level class, years ago. You'd think the curriculum might emphasize assembly as well as design, but I guess there's no time. So here we are, saying rude words as the solder balls up on the soldering iron and not on the pins. This is the easy part. Once we get all the components soldered onto the board, we'll have to wire them up.

"It's going to be mind-numbing," Mountain Girl says with authority.

243 words | March 28, 2005 10:29 PM | Ivory tower
Comments

The secret to good soldering is a toothpick and the flux paste that is the consistency of karo syrup. Once I learned the solder goes where the flux is (and that its better to heat the wire and then touch the solder to the wire instead of the iron); I seemed to do a lot better.

And these days, you should be able to get lead free solder. Though I managed to keep most of my mental facilities despite breathing in great quantities of the stuff. (Not to mention my adventures in enclosed spaces with a soldering iron and a can of bug-spray.)

Posted by: Derek at March 28, 2005 10:40 PM

Once we found the flux pen, we started dabbing flux around and that helped. We're getting better at it and also at removing stuff. We may have to make a second prototype (Dr. Smith may want to send this one down as a reference for whoever makes up the PCB version), which will probably come out really well as we're the sort who learn from our mistakes.

Bug spray? My brothers used that to set each other on fire.

Posted by: Nee-chama at March 29, 2005 07:32 PM