The main advantage of kits, is a circuit board and collection of parts, and relatively mindless assembly. You aren't designing or debugging things, or understanding how they work (unless you look at that carefully). This is purely an exercise in attention, small motor skills, and vision. (Hence the magnifying glasses!!). Back when I was working at hardware manufacturers, believe it or not, engineers were prohibited from soldering a single thing anywhere! No one trusts the soldering skills of engineers... had to have the skilled technicians do any soldering. #electronics
First step is the resistors. Lowest profile components, hard to get to later when tall stuff is on the board. Looking over these very carefully one by one. I used to not use magnifying glasses, but then I soldered something and posted a photo here on tbe Fediverse and was told how terrible I was at soldering, lol. Mainly, bad eyes!! Got worse as I got older. #electronics
It took me quite a while to solder all that. There's actually a missing component here (which I just fixed). The lettering on the blue capacitors was so small (tiny!!) and lightly printed, I could not read them with the highest magnification lens set... ended up having to use two sets of lenses to resolve the numbers 😵💫. #electronics
Here's that missing component... totally skipped a resistor!! Took a pause at this point and now inside I air conditioning and for rehydration. It's repressively hot out there. El Nino + climate impacts really suck. #electronics
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Also need to go look up the polarity of an LED. I never remember this. I have looked this up a hundred times. But it does not stick. #led #electronics
