Soldering Assignment

Description

The soldering assignment is a basic soldering exercise that ensures all ECE 445/ME 470 students understand how to solder surface-mount and through-hole devices. Students will be provided with the necessary PCB, components, solder, flux, etc. The details of the soldering assignment can be found in the assignment sheet.

Your end product should look similar to the following. You will create a small device that blinks an LED at varying frequencies when the button is pressed, based on a potentiometer reading.

Below is a series of soldering tutorials. The critical ingredient that you need to make your life easier while surface mount soldering (and through-hole too) is flux. There is liquid, water-soluble flux available in the lab. If you can't find it or don't know what it looks like, ask a lab staff member or TA for help.

Requirements and Grading

The soldering assignment is worth 10 points and is graded via inspection by a TA or Lab Staff member. Students are allowed to make as many attempts as necessary to complete the assignment.

Submission and Deadlines

The soldered PCB must be presented to a course staff member before the deadline listed on the Course Calendar.

Video Tutorials

Below are a few public video tutorials on Soldering. There is also a text description of how to solder on the soldering assignment doc linked above.

Through-hole (THT) and surface-mount (SMD) soldering tutorial:

Tutorial on using the various types of flux:

Tutorial on using wick to remove solder:

Tutorial on using a heat gun:

Featured Project

The amphibious spherical explorer (ASE) is a spherical robot for home monitoring, outdoor adventure or hazardous environment surveillance. Due to the unique shape of the robot, ASE can travel across land, dessert, swamp or even water by itself, or be casted by other devices (e.g. slingshot) to the mission area. ASE has a motion-sensing system based on Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and rotary magnetic encoder, which allows the internal controller to adjust its speed and attitude properly. The well-designed control system makes the robot free of visible wobbliness when it is taking actions like acceleration, deceleration, turning and rest. ASE is also a platform for research on control system design. The parameters of the internal controller can be assigned by an external control panel in computer based on MATLAB Graphic User Interface (GUI) which communicates with the robot via a WiFi network generated by the robot. The response of the robot can be recorded and sent back to the control panel for further analysis. This project is completely open-sourced. People who are interested in the robot can continue this project for more interesting features, such as adding camera for real-time surveillance, or controller design based on machine learning.