Tips & Tricks & Just a Good Read: ‘Ultimate Guide to Soldering’ by @pimoroni
From ‘blobby solder joints’ and ‘wonky’ pins to finishing touches, Pimoroni have an excellent ‘Ultimate Guide to Soldering‘ written by their own head of digital content Sandy Macdonald. They use a Raspberry Pi Zero W to demonstrate many of the proper procedures and pitfalls of soldering – such as bridged connections or solder blobs. Since the Zero W typically requires two long rows of header pins to solder it’s a good device for you to test your skills and proficiency with the iron on. (When you have to focus on soldering 40 pins you can really get in a groove, and also see where your shortcomings are.)
This guide will aim to cover everything you need to know, and probably a fair bit you don’t need to know, about soldering. Soldering isn’t an easy skill to learn, although it’s easy to do it badly, but there are lots of tips that aren’t immediately obvious that can help you out a bunch.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
