An Interlude: Confronting Demons and Skeletons

By Bobby Winters
I may have shared with you before the brain block I have with regard to soldering.  When I was a kid, I’d gotten a computer kit that required soldering.  I made a mess of it and it wouldn’t work. It cost a lot of money, and we didn’t have all that much.  So, in my shame, I put it aside.
Since I’ve begun playing with microcontrollers, it’s become clear to me that beyond a certain point I will need to know how to solder.  Breadboards are nice, but anything that’s not going to be taken apart eventually will need to be soldered together.  I’ve taken to a program of learning the manly skill of soldering.  I’ve confronted the soldering demon.
I will never be an artist.  Heck, I may never actually solder anything that works.  But I am beyond the “Oh my gosh, what a mess” stage.  It boils down to those three words people have been telling me all my life: “Take your time!” Yes, that’s it.  That’s the secret.  One must decide that soldering is a thing that one must do and then set out the preparations to do it.  
The first thing is to prepare a place.  You’ve got to have a place to do your work.  The second is to have all of your materials around you.  You need your soldering iron, its stand, a little wet sponge to clean your tip on, and--this helped me a lot--a desoldering iron complete with attached desoldering bulb.  I always do a better job writing when I have an eraser, so it figures I do a better job soldering when I have a desoldering iron.
All of that having been said, I’ve not been able to solder a heat sensor to the pc board yet.  I think that I’m frying them.  I hook them to my thermometer program and they read -196.6. I tried three times and got this result three times with three different ruined sensors--and I’ve tried using a alligator clip as a heat sink.  In the world of digital thermal sensors, I am now known as He-who-brings-hot-death.  I am now looking for conductive glue on Amazon.
On other news, I’ve gotten a skeleton for my ProtoCylon.  There’s a picture below.  My experience in opening the box and thinking about putting it together made me think of building the pyramids.  I knew it could be done, but thousands might die in the process. There were parts--nuts, bolts, wheels, motors, plates--but no directions.  I have got something screwed--such a versatile word--together, but it was interesting.  I suppose they thought it would be more interesting without the directions.

Attacking the Soldering Demon

Attacking the Soldering Demon

By Bobby Neal Winters

I may have mentioned in an earlier post that I have demons which have kept me from pursuing the world of electronics: the Demon of Lack-of-Self-Confidence; the Demon of Fear-of-Loss-Money.

Chief among my demons up until now has been the Soldering Demon.  I ran into this demon while trying to put together a kit for an RF-modulator for an ELF computer.  I had never soldered before, but I figured I would try.  The directions which came with the kit were as encouraging as they were racist and sexist: “These parts are usually assembled by teenage Mexican girls.”

I kid you not.

It turns out that the teenage Mexican girls out did me.  Instead of an RF-modulator I created a one-and-a-half by two-inch rectangle of lead or tin or what-the-hell-ever.  Money was tight in those days growing up, so this failure carried a huge load of guilt.

Time rolled forward and a tried to fight the demon by getting electronic kits for my older daughters.  The oldest one was game.  She could handle hot glue like a pro, and I figured it was just a small step from there to soldering.

Wrong.

We tried a telephone kit.  I figured that since she wanted a phone in her room that this would be an incentive.  We got started, but we couldn’t follow through.

The problem is that there is actually something to be learned.  There is a certain amount of patience, a certain amount of hand-eye coordination, and a certain amount of skill that only practice can bring.

Roll time forward again.

As a part of my continuing Zombie Apocalypse Crystal Radio quest, I came upon directions for a Three-Penny Radio. This takes the crystal radio one or two steps further by introducing amplification. The problem is that it required a bit of soldering, but this was turned into a virtue by making the soldering simple.

We did this late yesterday afternoon.  We’d put together a solar cell kit earlier and this had gone well.  I thought we could start on the Three-Penny Radio by just doing part of it, but Lydia wanted to push on.  This was a mistake because I hadn’t had a chance to look over the directions.  [The directions on the site are complete, but they’ve not been idiot-proofed as we shall see.]

We soldered it all together, stuck the earpiece in our ears, and nada. Nothing. Simon and Garfunkle’s Sound of Silence done for real.  It was then that Lydia exercised an amount of discretion that I didn’t have until just a few years ago.

“Let’s fix this later, Dad.”

So we put it away.

Went to bed last night, church this morning, ate lunch, and took a nap.

When I woke up, Lydia was gone.

I went to the table and compared what we’d done to the picture in the instructions.  The two were different.  

I then did what you do when you solder something incorrectly.  I un-soldered it and re-soldered it.  I put the battery in it, put the earpiece in my ear, and heard the beautiful sound of static.  With a little tuning, this was replaced by music.

I rock.

I am now waiting for Lydia to get back to receive her assessment.