SparkFun Electronics – Surface Mount Soldering Class

SparkFun Electronics hosted an SMD soldering class last night at their offices here in Boulder so I thought it would be a great geek out opportunity for myself and my son Billy.  I honestly thought it would be much more difficult than it was, but it certainly did take some practice to develop a usable technique and some Jedi soldering advice from Nate and Matt didn’t hurt either.  Billy is 13 and the benefits of youth came in handy when trying to solder a fine pitch SMD chip.  My eyes are getting worse by the day and I really couldn’t focus enough to see what the hell I was doing on some of the parts, but there is an amazing amount of the technique that was purely by touch.  Use the force Luke!

The outcome of the class was a Simon game with four colored LED push pads.  The microcontroller at the center of the device is the ATmega168 which is commonly found on the Arduino boards these days.  The software for the game is available from the Sparkfun web site and was programmed onto the chip through the Arduino IDE.  I think Billy and I are going to hack around with the Arduino IDE and write up some new programs on our Simon games just for shits and grins.  We put in a special request for an Arduino/Processing class so that would be a blast if they decide to put one together.

This picture shows just how small these solder joints are.  The trained eye will laugh at my solder work (its quite bad when you look through a magnifying glass), but the damn thing works like a champ…  or it did until it sat in my car for an hour at 15deg F on the way home and something shrunk up from the cold.  But hey, if you hold it just right and give it some love, it works just fine.  I guess I need to buy Billy and I a soldering iron for some touch up work    By the way, we hand soldered *everything* onto this board, including the AT168 and all of those little tiny resistors and caps.  Some of those who had soldering experience finished in about 1.5-2 hours while those of us with nada took up the full 3 hours and then some extra for troubleshooting bad joints, etc.

Matt and Nate did a great job with the class and were extremely helpful to us beginners, even staying an extra hour to help Billy and I troubleshoot a problem with one of our boards and send us home with some swag.  They tell me that they are going to try to do a new class every month or so, so if you live in the Boulder area or you just want an excuse to come put in some slope time in Colorado, keep an eye on their front page for more classes. 

More pictures of the class here on my Flickr.

Thanks to Nate, Matt and the SparkFun folks for a really great time.