volume one

We went to the Electromagnetic Field Camp - indeed I’m still there… (I’m finishing up this post on the Sunday) And it’s quite an overwhelming experience for a first timer. But. I did my first ever bit of soldering. And it almost worked. I’d seen the following on the schedule “Duck Soldering” - which I foolishly assumed would be beginner friendly. I’ve never soldered before. It feels bold to say such a thing, in the middle of a festival full of makers, scientists, hackers and nerds.

Luckily there was no real judgement. Which was great. But not a lot of help either. And the first thing to do was to start by soldering on all the tiny surface mount LEDs. This was a baptism of fire - helped by the fact that my fellow attendees were also struggling. Indeed - most of my table gave up and buggered off to the pub.

Actually, one of the volunteers gave us a demo of how to solder, and took a cursory glance at my initial attempts at soldering, and pronounced them “not bad” - which helped!

I persevered, and almost had a technique down once I’d finally got all the tiny LEDs on the board. My technique, such as it was is:

• Add a blob of solder to one of the surface mounts on the board… and let it cool
• Grab a tiny component with the tweezers…
• …heat the blob of solder, and slide the component onto it.
• Remove the soldering iron, and allow the solder to cool - which locks the component in place
• Then add a blob of solder onto the other connector - this is supposed to be done by heating the connector on the board - then adding solder… but the technique seemed to be just stick the soldering iron near the connector - add in some solder, and wiggle things around until things look connected…

Once I’d fitted all the LEDs, I was feeling a lot more confident…

…but then I had to fit the custom chip. Again, a surface mount component, and now I have to solder down all the little legs, without managing to cross the streams. I managed to get two legs cross soldered, and spent an inordinate amount of time trying to clear the solder from the IC legs. I really wasn’t convinced it was actually fully connected

THEN - there were a bunch of tiny transistors. Some labelled 5C and some labelled 6C in a tiny font that was absolutely impossible to read. Or could only be read properly once you had soldered the component in place… And then I got the wrong transistors in the wrong place… and tried (but failed) to get them removed and placed where they were supposed to be.

Rapidly running out of time, I decided to move on to the next steps - as the instructions say the transistors are used for the quacking part. So I did get the capacitors on. And the power switch. And the speaker (my duck board is supposed to be able to go “quack” when you press the button) but couldn’t face adding the two missing transistors that I knew were the WRONG transistors.

With just a few minutes left - I connected up a battery, pressed the button, and held my breath…

The person running the session was also the person who’d designed the duck boards and chips - Arne. He took one look at my partially flashing board, and told me that the lack of lights was down to not all the legs on the custom chip being connected. Which doesn’t surprise me - and is something I can go back and try to fix later, if I’m feeling brave.

I now have a new found respect for the amazing work of StezStixFix on YouTube who spends his time removing components, re-soldering and generally doing magic in attempting to fix dead electronics that folks send to him.

But - I survived, and it almost works. And what a fun thing to get to learn at a festival. EMF is amazing… (not least ‘cos I’ve got Wifi accross the site so I can do blogging from a field. A first…)