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masukomi @masukomi@connectified.com
1y
I’m going to call this well done for my first time soldering on tiny circuit boards.

It’s kind of funny how the first one is crap and they very visibly get better in the order I soldered them.

(Second photo for scale)
A tiny circuit board with four wires soldered to it. It is being held up by an alligator clip with rubber tips.
A photograph of me holding the circuit board in a mylar bag. The board is barely larger than my thumbnail.
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masukomi @masukomi@connectified.com
1y
A Boxelder bug kept an eye on me to make sure i I wasn’t doing anything stupid while I soldered
Photograph of a Boxelder bug on a cutting mat. It is approximately half an inch long.
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masukomi @masukomi@connectified.com
1y
It is successfully recognized by my computer! So I didn’t mess anything up too badly. Now I just have to attach the other circuit board.
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masukomi @masukomi@connectified.com
1y
Good news, bad news. Good news is I think I did a good job with the soldering. Bad news is that it is no longer recognized by the computer.

Maybe good news is that this happened when I was doing it on the breadboard too. I thought it was just poor connections plus inexperience.

I’m not really looking forward to to debugging this, because I have absolutely no clue how.
A close-up of a tiny circuit board with a CO2 sensor. There are 4 wires soldered onto it, and I think the joints are pretty damn good for a beginner.
An ESP32-C6 circuit board with four wires soldered to it. Two of the solder joints are decent. Two of them are pretty ugly.
A photograph of the set up I am using in order to see what I am doing. There is a stand with flexible, arms that end in alligator clips that is holding one of the circuit ports. Above that is a magnifying glass, suspended by another arm. Above, that is a large ring light that I am looking through.
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pathetic piss kitten @kitten@elizabeth.cat
1y
@masukomi looks nice! do you want a couple tips?
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masukomi @masukomi@connectified.com
1y
@kitten hell yes. I have no clue what i’m doing.
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pathetic piss kitten @kitten@elizabeth.cat
1y
@masukomi
- D4 on the ESP32 looks perfect, it should be your target. GND similarly.
- the pins on the sensor feel like they could use a little bit more tin
- 3V3 in the board could use a touch-up (no more tin, just touching what it's already there with the iron for it to shape and bond better)
- I don't see any flux on your workspace, it makes things a lot easier

also, if you want to just practice, you can get some stripboards and some cheap components (capacitors, resistors, etc)
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pathetic piss kitten @kitten@elizabeth.cat
1y
@masukomi oh this is literally your first time soldering?

then yes, you'd probably thank practicing with a stripboard, if anything just to get used to how the tin flows, or how to fix the different fuck-ups that always happen (too much tin, too little tin, too cold iron, etc)
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masukomi @masukomi@connectified.com
1y
@kitten yes. Well first time soldering anything on a board. And the last time was something totally imprecise decades ago.

I really have no idea what i’m doing. Just stumbling through a “simple” project.
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masukomi @masukomi@connectified.com
1y
@kitten 🙇‍♀️thank you. Will apply suggestions. Don’t really know what to do with flux but i’m sure the web can tell me
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pathetic piss kitten @kitten@elizabeth.cat
1y
@masukomi I have a liquid one that has a small "brush" in the lid (kinda like a nail polish bottle). you put it in the pieces you want to solder, in the spots to solder. it makes tin flow a lot smoother.
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pathetic piss kitten @kitten@elizabeth.cat
1y
@masukomi (it also leaves a brown-ish burnt residue but it's not harmful to the electronics and goes away easily with IPA)
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pathetic piss kitten @kitten@elizabeth.cat
1y
@masukomi oh btw another thing, although this is not really about the soldering part: from what I've read, soldering cables directly to PCBs makes for fragile joints. usually it's preferable to just solder headers to the PCBs and then connect them with jumper wires (plus that way you can swap parts easily)
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David Turner @davecturner@mastodon.online
1y
@masukomi @kitten on the debugging front, the mistakes I make are typically daft things like poor connections or shorts (check with a multimeter, tho your photos look good). After that, maybe try a logic analyser? A cheap USB one should be about $30 or less and mine has cleared up many mysteries in its time.
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masukomi @masukomi@connectified.com
1y
@davecturner @kitten currently (🤞) hoping it’s not the soldering since i never got it working on the breadboard without soldering (2 different means) so I’m thinking either it may be the sensor board?

Gonna try soldering header pins and redo the breadboard experiment with one of the other two pairs and try to get it working that way.

Not sure what a logic analyzer is it how to use one but will investigate if this doesn’t work out.
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David Turner @davecturner@mastodon.online
1y
@masukomi @kitten a logic analyser records a time series of voltages, like an multi-channel oscilloscope except that each channel is just a binary on/off value per sample rather than an absolute voltage (so it's simpler and cheaper to make). It's useful in this kind of situation because it can distinguish "source is not sending valid-looking data" from "destination is failing to receive valid-looking data from source" which sorta halves the problem space.
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