Since I’ve been mucking with electronics again recently, I spent some xmas money on a Weller temperature-controlled soldering iron, my POS Radio Shack Board Burner 2000 no longer cutting it. Then I took the time last weekend to set up a workbench of sorts with some component drawers and all that good stuff. All it needs is a logic analyzer, oscope, and bench supply (yeah right!).
Yesterday I received a kit in the mail from Spark Fun for an Arduino ‘shield.’ This is a little board that plugs on top of the Arduino microcontroller board, in this case giving you a little prototyping area. You get the PCB and a few resistors, LEDs and jumper headers to solder onto the board. It took me about an hour with my new setup to put the thing together, and I must say the Weller is *great*. Every single one of my solder connections was perfect whereas with my old iron there would be huge blobs everywhere, scorch marks on the PCB, cold joints aplenty. In another 10 minutes, I had wired up a circuit that basically implements a BCD to 7 segment converter with the microcontroller (i.e., it counts from 0-9 continuously). Here are some ugly phone-cam pics. Aren’t you so cuuute wit your widdle breadboard!
