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 Here's a quick video of drag soldering--a technique that enables you to quickly solder entire sides of ICs by simply dragging the iron across all the pins.  The key is starting with the right amount of solder, and adding generous flux.  The results are often better and more uniform than individual pin soldering. 

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A common mistake we've seen in our classes--as well as from experienced 'solderers'--is to clean the tip before putting the iron back in its stand.  This habit leaves the tip exposed to oxygen in the air which works quickly to oxidize (basically rusting) the end of the tip.  Almost all metals oxidize in air, and they do so much faster at higher temperatures.  When your tip is thoroughly oxidized, it will look burnt, and no solder will stick to it. And if solder won't stick to it, you won't be able to create a "heat bridge" of solder between the iron and part, and very little heat will transfer.

To avoid this, coat the tip with a large blob of solder every time before returning it to its stand.  While flux in the solder gradually eats away at the tip, oxidation will cause problems much faster. 

You may notice that new tips actually come coated with solder. We've seen manufacturer documentation recommending that you hold solder against a new tip the first time you heat it up so that the tip gets coated as soon as it's hot enough to melt solder.

Cleaning tip: If your tip is starting to look brown, and won't 'hold' solder, or the solder acts like water on a freshly waxed car, you can help restore it by repeatedly applying solder and wiping it off.  The flux in the solder acts like a cleaning against against the built up oxides.  It may take 20 or more cycles of this to get the tip back into shape.

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Here's an instructable showing how to Control a Hand Drill with an Arduino / roboduino to spool solder. This may not be on the top of everyone's project list, but a hand drill is strong enough to do a lot of tasks, so we hope this will be helpful to someone with another project idea,... maybe spooling guitar pickups.

Rather than use TRIACs to mess with the 120VAC, we found a servo was an easy and safe way to control the drill's trigger / throttle.  The setup also uses a home made optical encoder that triggers an interrupt in the arduino code.  The code is available here, and contains some useful bits like lookup-table speed control, state machine menu system, and interrupt based speed sensing.

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While SMT leds typically have a dot or small green line indicating their cathode, it can be hard to remember.  A quick way to test a LED is by touching the ends with a multimeter in 'Continuity Test' mode.  The multimeter generates a small voltage in order to detect a closed circuit, and this is enough to light the LED.  Although we couldn't burn out any LEDs with this Fluke, there's no guarantee your meter won't over-do the current, so we recommend doing just a quick touch, or putting a resistor in line.

 

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Inspired by Steve Chamberlin's post evaluating kicad vs eagle for someone new to both, here are some more opinions from the perspective of someone who uses both equally, (about 20 projects for both), but is certainly not an expert at either.

Summary: Eagle is more straightforward, has better library support of out of the box, and better community support (ladyada, sparkfun, etc.).

Kicad is free, and is maybe 1 or 2 revisions from being great.

Click the entry for our list of pros and cons:

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We program boot loaders on a decent number of ATMEGAs for our roboduino kit, which involves a lot of pin bending and IC pulling. To speed up the process, Oren transformed this arduino into a program-o-duino by soldering on a ZIF(Zero Insertion Force) socket.  Now it just takes a quick pull of the lever to pop the chip in and out.

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A demo showing off more of the capabilities of the Voice of Saturn Sequencer

 

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This video demonstrates how to solder a QFN or MLF chip without solder paste or stencils.  While solder paste and a stencil will product the most consistent results, this demonstration only uses an iron, flux, hot air and regular solder to get the job done.  

Future videos will demonstrate how to use a solder paste syringe, as well as the recommended method of using a stencil.

Equipment used in this video:

• Aoyue 6028 Hot Air SMD Rework Station
• Tweezers for Surface Mount Devices (SMDs)
• Alcohol Dispensing Pump Bottle
• Chipquik No-Clean Paste Flux Syringe
• Liquid Flux
• Flux / Alcohol Bottle
• Desoldering wick/braid
• .02 SAC (lead free) solder
• Horse Hair Brush (ESD safe when wet)
• Hakko 50W Soldering Station
• 10X Magnifying Loupe

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Here's a quick demo of our new FM Radio Shield, featuring its ability to read the RDS text data off the radio stream and display it in the Arduino Serial Monitor. 

The FM Shield also:

• digitally control station, volume
• read station strength to find good stations, or empty bands
• head phone amplifier, uses headphone wire as antenna

The FM Radio Shield is available for purchase.

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On Saturday April 24th Travis Thatcher will be conducting a workshop on simple DIY electronics for music and the construction of a Voice of Saturn Synth. See more info after the jump.

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We're happy to release a new FM Radio Arduino Shield that lets you listen to and control FM Radio.  With its abilit to read RDS info, the station / artist / song names can be displayed, and with a bit of code, you could have it automatically change channels when commercials play.

You can also digitally change the station, volume, and read the signal strength to find the strongest or weakest stations.  Finding weak stations could help you find a good transmission gap for your FM transmitter.

If there's a station broadcasting traffic info via RDS, that would also be available. 

 

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A Frac Rack version of our Filter kit is now available: Voice of Saturn Voltage Controlled Filter

The VoS Voltage Controlled Filter is based around a CEM3372 filter IC (4-pole resonant low-pass filter)--the same chips found in the filters of such analog classics as the Sequential Circuits Prophet 600, Prophet T8 and Oberheim Xpander.  It features two inputs that are summed and then fed into the low-pass filter. The input and output volumes, cutoff frequency and resonance can all be controlled by VC (voltage control) or knobs.

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We've got a new look, what do you think?  We'll be transitioning parts of our old over to the new one gradually, so please let us know about any bugs!

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In order to get more out of your CV1 input on your VoS synth, we have come up with a simple mod that will help you do more with your synth. The mod should take only about 15 minutes and requires adding a new wire and moving an old one.

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Thanks for all the links to our videos, we just passed 1M views on our youtube channel, along with 1002 subscribers. Let us know if you'd like any videos on specific topics. Read More