I started making a synthesizer project a few months ago (see here)
and I’ve made a bunch of progress over the past week, majority of my stalling is that I royally messed my soldering iron tips:
(Left is a new tip…They’re not supposed to be black and blue).
This happened because I used a bunch of solder that didn’t have rosin in it and I left the iron on for too long and for too hot (for both of those tips). Then when I figured “Oh hey I can just swipe a some solder tips from work” I realized almost all of the tips available to me aren’t for my crappy $40 weller iron (https://www.microcenter.com/product/659318/weller-5-to-30-variable-wattage-precision-grip-soldering-iron-station-120v) and are for professional grade irons. So what did I do? I attempted to scrape off oxidation with a screw driver and rubbed down the exposed metal with a one of the non-fitting tips. It ended up working, but only on a small region of one portion could even be tinned.
Now that I was able to actually solder I pulled out some perfboard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfboard) and started soldering just to hit a bunch of walls because: 1.) I was crazy and tried to make things look good 2.) I didn’t plan at all. However I managed to get through the first board and get it fully tested:
(The moving squares means it works…) You can see the wires on the board, which you really shouldn’t have to do for most applications if you do it right…
Once I hit the first wall I started modifying my eeutils program thing (see https://github.com/wfkolb/EEUtils) so I can get a good perf board placement plan.
Which is all well and good, however I realized why aren’t I just making a PCB instead of re-creating a crappy pcb editor for one off prototype usage…
So yeah I put it all in kicad
and made a pcb.
(Those resistors are not supposed to be on the bottom…)
You might be amazing but I think anyone who’s done this before will most likely be horrified. I went in there like a kid with a paintbrush and started connecting things. No consideration to impedance, ground planes, cost, signal integrity etc. etc…
To be honest I’m skeptical it would even work if I plugged it in.
So in my ambition I went over to microfab to see how much it would cost to build:
And that’s without me adding parts, doing pick/place etc….
So maybe I’ll stick with the perf board for now.
(banner image from wikipedia Arc flash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_flash)