|
Advice page for lab 3a
This lab is mostly soldering. But it's also a very challenging soldering task to
get right. You'll need a bit of patience to get going, but once you've got the
technique figured out, it's a lot of fun. Then after a while it gets tedious,
but it's rewarding when you have a finished product :)
Fail fast! Check your structure works as you expect it to after each step.
Put some leads on your bench power supply, grab a resistor, and make sure
that when you touch various points on your lattice, they work as your expect.
Don't wait until your cube is all fully constructed to do this: do it after
each layer! If you're doing something wrong, you want to know about it before
it's too much work to fix.
Although the lab is mostly soldering, it pays a lot to take the time to
position your LED legs correctly before you pick up the soldering iron. Don't
be surprised if you spend (a lot) more time positioning things so you can
solder them, than you do actually soldering them.
The trick with soldering two legs together so that they look even is to start
with your iron at one end of the two LED legs, and drag your iron (with the
solder) to the other. Be sure that the entire joint is covered though — a
common error (and one that we've seen repeatedly in earlier labs) is to leave
solder on only one side of the joint.
|