Tag: soldering

Emma’s second-grade poster project

Emma is in the second grade (7-8 year olds). And she’s already well on her way to being a fully fledged engineer.

Every year, Emma’s school runs a State Board project, where each kid in the second grade is assigned a US state to make a trifold poster about. Emma’s already a Maker Faire veteran who knows how to solder and how to use a milling machine. She programs in Python, and she’s very keen on electronics; so with some help from Dad she used a Raspberry Pi to turn her poster into an all-singing, all-dancing interactive Vermont extravaganza.

Here’s a great bit of video of Emma showing off her soldering skills; she’s constructing a Perma-Proto that’s used in the project. She learned how to solder at Maker Faire in NY last year; those adults among you who sometimes comment here saying you haven’t ever done any soldering and don’t feel you have the time to learn should hang your heads. (And then go and buy a soldering iron.) Remember: Soldering is Easy.

When I was Emma’s age, I was glueing fake fur, lentils and macaroni onto a large cut-out ankylosaurus. If I remember correctly, I wasn’t allowed to use the scissors on my own, so someone else did the cutting-out for me. I feel a little outclassed.

Well done Emma – we’re all really impressed by your project and your technological skills, and we hope you’ll let us know if you use a Raspberry Pi in any of your future schoolwork!

You can learn more about Emma’s State Board project at Dad’s website.

Mike Cook builds a Gertboard in three minutes

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.

—

“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.”

Soldering is Easy – comic

We’re in Reykjavík this week, and met up on our arrival with some of the guys from HakkavéIin (The Hack Machine), who spent the evening demonstrating just how great Icelanders are. Board games in an independent cinema foyer, very large langoustines, microbrew and debates about the command line: what could be better?

I spent a lot of the evening talking to the most excellent Andie Nordgren. Andie is a technical producer at CCP games, and she’s also one of the team behind a very handy instructional comic about soldering. Click the image to download a pdf of the whole seven pages. It’s a great visual reference and a cool thing to put on the wall; you can also use it as an educational tool, encouraging kids to colour in resistors…and to do some soldering. Thanks Andie!