Soldering Assignment

Description

The soldering assignment is a basic soldering exercise that ensures all ECE 445/ME 470 students understand how to solder surface-mount and through-hole devices. Students will be provided with the necessary PCB, components, solder, flux, etc. The details of the soldering assignment can be found in the assignment sheet.

Your end product should look similar to the following. You will create a small device that blinks an LED at varying frequencies when the button is pressed, based on a potentiometer reading.

Below is a series of soldering tutorials. The critical ingredient that you need to make your life easier while surface mount soldering (and through-hole too) is flux. There is liquid, water-soluble flux available in the lab. If you can't find it or don't know what it looks like, ask a lab staff member or TA for help.

Requirements and Grading

The soldering assignment is worth 10 points and is graded via inspection by a TA or Lab Staff member. Students are allowed to make as many attempts as necessary to complete the assignment.

Submission and Deadlines

The soldered PCB must be presented to a course staff member before the deadline listed on the Course Calendar.

Video Tutorials

Below are a few public video tutorials on Soldering. There is also a text description of how to solder on the soldering assignment doc linked above.

Through-hole (THT) and surface-mount (SMD) soldering tutorial:

Tutorial on using the various types of flux:

Tutorial on using wick to remove solder:

Tutorial on using a heat gun:

Featured Project

There is a drastic lack of networking infrastructure in unstable or remote areas, where businesses don’t think they can reliably recoup the large initial cost of construction. Our goal is to bring the internet to these areas. We will use a network of extremely affordable (<$20, made possible by IoT technology) solar-powered nodes that communicate via Wi-Fi with one another and personal devices, donated through organizations such as OLPC, creating an intranet. Each node covers an area approximately 600-800ft in every direction with 4MB/s access and 16GB of cached data, saving valuable bandwidth. Internal communication applications will be provided, minimizing expensive and slow global internet connections. Several solutions exist, but all have failed due to costs of over $200/node or the lack of networking capability.

To connect to the internet at large, a more powerful “server” may be added. This server hooks into the network like other nodes, but contains a cellular connection to connect to the global internet. Any device on the network will be able to access the web via the server’s connection, effectively spreading the cost of a single cellular data plan (which is too expensive for individuals in rural areas). The server also contains a continually-updated several-terabyte cache of educational data and programs, such as Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg. This data gives students and educators high-speed access to resources. Working in harmony, these two components foster economic growth and education, while significantly reducing the costs of adding future infrastructure.