Mike Cook, a regular Raspberry Pi contributor and electronics Superman, videoed himself building a Gertboard. Mike claims that it’s time-lapse (or GertLapse to use Mike’s phrase, although this sounds like something unspeakable has happened to poor old Gert). But we all know that it’s actually real time and that Mike used a gimmicked clock just to make us mortals feel better about our soldering skills.
I’ll let Mike introduce it: I’ve got to finish waxing the floors of Raspberry Pi Towers. And the hallway goes on and on–if I didn’t know better I’d suspect that it was infinite.
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“While the future of the Gert Board as a kit might be in doubt at the moment I thought I would have a go at videoing my attempt to construct a Gert Board. When it arrived I deliberately did not open it until the filming began. First I have to modify an old video camera so that it would take images automatically at set intervals, I found that the fastest I could do this was 3.25 seconds per frame. Then I tipped out the contents of my package and began assembling it. I was surprised that the packets of surface mount components contained only the Farnell part number and not the component’s value.
Unfortunately on the first part of the video the camera malfunctioned so you miss the surface mount and LED soldering. However, the rest of the construction was not too error prone and the camera worked. There is a clock showing the time in one corner and I did take some breaks during construction. The music was something by son composed years ago when he was at school and adds to the urgency of getting it built. I wish I could solder as fast as that in real life.”
