Week 4
Weekly tasks
- Create an electronic circuit that will do something (at least blink). Do not use a non-soldering field for interconnection
- Variants:
- Solder (or even mill) the PCB of a simple flasher.
- Build a flasher from discrete components on a universal PCB, possibly as a freeform circuit
- Build a flasher with an Arduino (we'll cover this more next week, you can get inspiration from the Arduino Projects Book) - put the Arduino in the hollows so it can be taken out.
- Document the wiring diagram on the website.
Soldering
We are officially entering the "dark forest" that's called electonics. Do I know anything about it besides theoretical knowledge of how electrons behave in electromagnetic field? No. Do I want to learn? Definitely yes. During the lectures I learned that something like Freeform circuit exists and one day I want to try it. However, there is this little catch, called Soldering. For this week I chose to solder the PCB of flasher.
The first stumbling block was the actual reading of this thing. For the first time I felt the shame of the lack of knowledge. Fortunately, my colleague was so nice and took me through everything.
The soldering itself was awful. My hands were shaking, I was gradually losing patience and felt the need to have an extra hand. In doing all this, I was constantly wondering: is this a sufficient amount of solder or is it not enough? Will it conduct current? Gladly my another much more experienced colleague guided me.
After an hour of soldering this monstrosity it was finished. I was thanking god at this point. But who would know that the biggest task for me would be to correctly connect "+" from source to "+" of my soldered thing. Yes, I am moron and the smoke began to rise from it. The good news are that after connecting it correctly some of diodes light up (thankfully, or else I would just cry right there).