Beginner's Guide to Soldering Electronics Part 2: Building a Kit

hi there my name is bruce rain from branches creations and this is my beginner's guide to soldering electronics part 2. [Music] [Applause] before we get started i'd like to mention my beginner's guide to soldering electronics part one if you haven't seen it i'd recommend taking a look although i don't do a whole lot of soldering in the video i do explain a lot of important information that could help you get better soldering results kits are a fun way to get into electronics and practice your soldering skills you can find kits for all skill levels starting with a simple one like this that makes a noise like a cricket all the way up to building a whole computer from scratch i like to make kits with some sort of practical purpose so i'll be doing this demonstration with a capacitor testing kit once complete i'll be able to use it to test capacitors i've included some links in the description to places where you will find some great kits to buy you'll also find links to all of the equipment i use as well as some budget alternatives so let's get started here is the kit that we're going to be building today i bought this one from robot gear here in australia but i will include links to other kit sellers in the description of this video let's have a look at we've got a printed circuit board we've got some instructions and then we've got all the components we need to build it so let's have a look at this all right now instructions for kits vary greatly from one kit to the next this one here looks like it's majority of it is just instructions uh of the actual kit once it's built but there is this little section here about uh how to assemble it's a little bit hard to translate what it's saying but essentially what it is saying is that the bom or bill of materials which can be found on the back here and this is a list of all of the components that are going to be used in it it says this is what we need to follow even if there is a component that is listed on this pcb or printed circuit board uh if it's not listed in the bill of materials don't put it on here uh so that's pretty much it they haven't really given much information we've obviously got uh labels on the on the kit so those labels help us work out which component on the bill of materials and then the bill of materials tells us what that component should actually be so for example here if we're looking at i don't know r12 we can look down here and see r12 that's the location there and it is a 3.3 kilo ohm resistor so that's all we really have for instructions here but sometimes with the more basic kits you might get much more detailed instructions they might actually go in and tell you which components to put in first which to put in second and a lot of the time they're just doing that so that you don't end up you know cramming yourself into a corner you might actually put a component in place which makes it really hard to access another component so they give you these the order in which to build it generally i build these in the order of small components first and then i put larger components in later on that's mainly because if you put big bulky components on and then you you know flipping it over to do the soldering you know the board ends up rocking on the table and it gets kind of cumbersome so i generally do all of the little components and then i put all the bigger components in after that now this is a through hole kit so in other words it has all these holes in it we will put the pins of the components through those holes and then solder them into the holes the alternative to that would be if it was surface mount where you just solder it onto a single side of the printed circuit board this one this is obviously a through-hole kit and i'll be going through those steps in my next video i'll be doing a surface mount soldering kit so i'll be focusing on surface mount soldering in the next video one of the things that i am going to use uh when i build this is this it's a little stand and it allows me to get this printed circuit board and put it into the holders and then that gives me the ability to easily access one side or the other so it holds that nice and firmly while i'm working on it it's not essential but it is one of the things you might want to get if you're going to do a lot of kits links in the description as to where you can buy yourself one of these stands so this video is designed as a soldering tutorial not as an electronics tutorial so i'll be going over the basics that we need in order to build the kit but i won't be going into any in-depth electronics theory the first thing i'm going to do is put all of the resistors in place these are the resistors here you can see they're blue and they have these little coloured lines on them uh and they indicate uh what the resistance is there are quite a lot of people that memorize all of the colours and what they mean and how you figure out what the the resistance is based on those colors i'm an extremely lazy person so i actually just use this utility here called resistor toolkit on my phone it allows me to just select what colors the bands are and then it'll tell me what the resistance is so looking at these resistors here under the microscope we can see that they're brown green black brown brown now when i put that into my software here it tells me that that is 1.5 kilo ohms so if we have a look at our instructions we can see here resistor 1.5 k and that goes in positions r1 r2 r3 r4 r5 r6 r7 and r8 so let's put those into the board okay so i'm going to get one of these resistors i'm just going to bend the pins like that and then i'll feed it into r1 here okay now this is a resistor resistors aren't polarized so it doesn't matter which way around you put them so i can put it in that way or i can spin it around and put it in that way okay now once it's in position here uh i want it i want to make sure it doesn't actually fall out when i spin this over so what i do is i just grab these pins and i just bend them slightly i don't bend them a whole lot just enough to stop the component from actually falling off the board until i solder it some people like to bend them all the way flat but i prefer not to do that because i find that if you accidentally put the wrong component in the wrong place it's it's a lot harder to desolder and remove that component if the pins are completely flat so i just try and bend them just the bare minimum to hold that component in place right now i'm going to solder this in position now i am using my budget soldering iron today you will find links in the description for this one an interesting thing in my last video i used a very very cheap soldering iron and i have actually had a lot of people come to me and say where can i buy that soldering iron that you used in the video now i used that soldering iron to demonstrate that soldering was more about technique than it was about equipment however that particular soldering iron has some massive design flaws so i wouldn't actually recommend that i do have budget soldering irons in the description that i recommend if you want to uh to use them i'm actually using one today for soldering so this is one of the budget ones and i'm also using a conical tip now i don't like using conical tips i like to use bevel tips on my soldering iron but because most cheap soldering irons come with conical tips i thought i would do this demonstration with a conical tip because that's what a lot of people will be using so i'm just going to give my tip a little bit of a clean if you want information about the maintenance of the tips please feel free to have a look at my beginner's guide to soldering video i go into a lot of detail about that sort of stuff one thing i do want to mention is someone did say if you're not using a soldering iron for a long period of time an extended period of time leave it with a little bit of solder on the tip and that is a good one i um i tend to use my soldering iron every day so i tend not to worry about that too much but if you are someone who does a bit of soldering and then puts a soldering iron away leave it with some solder on the tip it will make that tip last longer okay i'm going to use the the microscope view for this for this little bit the reason for that is i want you to be able to see the solder melting and hardening when i do this joint so most important thing when you're soldering is you want to make sure that you are getting everything that you want to solder nice and hot you don't put the solder onto the tip and then the tip and then try and transfer the solder onto what you're soldering you want to melt you want to get these the things you're soldering hot and then melt the solder onto it okay so let's get that hot and we put some solder on it and we will melt that onto the tip there and there's our joint and then you can see it as it hardens there let's go on to this next one let's get them nice and hot melt the solder onto the tip alright so onto the components transfers onto there and as you can see there's a lovely joint there nice and neat and tidy we don't have too much solder we don't have too little and when you see the smoke coming off that there i've got a few people that have put comments in the video saying oh you know this is lead this is bad it's dangerous to breathe in it's not lead lead doesn't go gaseous at this sort of temperature it takes temperatures over 450 c for lead to for you end up with lead gases um however that what you're seeing with the smoke is you're seeing flux burning off and that's not good for you so you need to make sure that you've got some fume extraction or you've got a fan set up or you know your very well ventilated area when you are working with lead though it is very important to have gloves or to wash your hands thoroughly afterwards because if you're working with leaded solder you don't want to transfer that lead to your mouth or to your eyes so so i am using leaded solder i prefer to use leaded solder okay now we want to clip off the excess of those pins so i'm just going to grab my little side cutters here and just give that a little snip and give that a little snip and that's one component all soldered into place let's do one more and so it's the same i get the resistor i'm going to just bend those pins i'm going to put him where he needs to be and this one is in r2 so we'll just pop that in there we will give those pins a slight bend and then let's do the soldering let's heat the components we want to solder melt the solder onto there and there we go and back to this one there we go all right let's give those pins a snip now one of the things we can do to save a bit of time is instead of going through and doing one at a time i can put a whole bunch of components in to start off with and then i can solder them all and then snip them all so save us a fair bit of time doing that so i'm going to start loading this up with these resistors so that's all of the 1.5 kilo ohm resistors in place so i'll just start with that lot and then we'll move on to the other resistors and now we snip off all the pins all the excess okay so there are all of the 1.5 k resistors in place now i haven't spent a great deal of time going in and keep making them all straight and neat and tidy not overly fussed with that as long as they're there and they're making contact i'm quite happy if you're a little bit more fastidious you may want to go and get them all lined up and all around the right way but i don't really care too much about that okay so our next resistor is 120 ohms so i'm looking for a brown red black black brown and here he is and the bit of materials tell me that he goes into position r9 which is there that's a 3.3 mega ohm going into position r11 3.3 kilo ohm going into position r12 i've got two 10 kilo ohm going into positions r13 and r14 and i've got 239 kilo ohms going into positions 15 and 16. okay bend these pins so they don't fall out probably put too many in at one time here it's a little bit cumbersome there we go and then let's do the soldering if when you're soldering the solder is not sticking it's not going where you want it to go generally the primary causes are you don't have enough heat um you know heat going to where you need it to go um see this one here is blobbed up quite a bit i'm not happy with that one at all we'll come back to that and tidy them up uh another reason is that your what you're trying to solder is dirty um or that you don't have enough flux when you're working with through hole soldering you and you're working like this where you're just melting the solder on to what you're soldering you've actually got the flux in the core of the solder which is doing its job and making that solder transfer nicely to what you're wanting to solder all nice and pretty so we don't need any additional flux might be different story if you're working with surface mount stuff but with the through-hole stuff you can generally get by just with the flux in the core of the solder no additional flux oh that one is a little bit blobby but the joint's okay i'm going to leave it as it is okay let's uh trim off these pins okay that is all of the resistors in place as you can see we have a few gaps here but as the instructions told us at the beginning there are some instances where there will be a spot for a component that is not actually needed and it's the bill of materials it's these instructions here that we follow which we have done the next component is a diode and diodes are designed to restrict electricity flow in only one direction so it's very important that these are actually put in place with the correct orientation if you put them backwards they're not doing their job you can see here this has a little stripe on one end that helps us to to know which end is which and if we have a look here we've got d1 that indicates the diode i'm just going to move the board down here a little bit and you can see that we have a stripe just there and that needs to line up with this stripe here so we're going to just bend those pins we're going to feed those through the hole push it down into position once again this isn't going to be super pretty if you want to spend time getting all these components all looking neat and tidy and and straight and all that sort of stuff by all means go and do that but i am let's go as far as to say i'm just rushing this right so stripe lines up with stripe let's solder this one in position and then trim the pins and there's our diode next up we have a couple of 22 picofarad ceramic capacitors these aren't polarized so these can go in any way around and you can see there has a there is a little 22 printed on the surface there tells us it's 22 pico farad these go into positions c1 and c2 next we have three point one microfarad ceramic capacitors now the printing on this says one zero four what tells that tells me is 1 0 and the 4 indicates how many zeros trailing after that so it's one zero plus another four zeros which is essentially one with five zeros that is one hundred thousand and it's telling me that is one 100 000 picofarads which is equivalent to 0.1 microfarad so these ones go into c3 c4 and c7 next up we have a couple of electrolytic capacitors now these are polarized and they actually have a stripe down the side indicating where negative is so that little stripe there is saying that this pin here is the negative pin and on this one here the stripe there that's the negative pin so it's very important these get put in the right way these actually have the the measurements written on them in nice clear words so this one we can see that this is a 100 micro farad 16 volt and this one here is a 10 micro farad 25 volt so that makes it nice and easy to know which one is which now the instructions have told us that uh for the polarized capacitors that the positive pin which is obviously the one on the other side to the to the negative stripe the positive pin should go into the square hole so you may not be able to see it but with these there we've got a round one and a square one so we're going to put this in c5 with the positive going through the square hole and the negative in the little round one okay we're just going to bend those pins a little bit and i'll grab the other one the other capacitor that's c6 and this is our 100 microfarad 16 volt and just move this again so that i've got my space the space i need and that's the positive into the square and the negative into the circle there we go so got that there we'll just bend these pins a little bit so it doesn't fall out and my solder next up we have ourselves a little voltage regulator and he is in position u2 which is just here these are fairly easy to figure which way around they go because they are flat on one side like that and that lines up with the flat bit on this side there so we just need to bend that middle pin out a little bit just enough just bend that little pin out there enough so that i can get these pins into these three holes and now we have a little 12 megahertz crystal oscillator so it's got 12.000 written on it there it shows it's a 12 megahertz and he can go in either way around and we'll just pop him in there bend those pins a little bit to hold him in position and we'll solder away okay now we're on to all of the interesting things that we need to actually put onto the board uh we have got a switch like this it's a little push button switch clicky click and he is going to go here into sw1 switch one so pop him in those pins aren't too long so i don't need to really trim them off at the end uh we have ourselves a little switch so a little on off switch that we have here uh the position of this one's fairly straightforward it's over here sw2 so let's get all these pins lined up there we go we've basically got two on the side here which are just kind of anchoring it in place and then you've got all of the main pins all those six pins in the middle there so i'll get him anchored on first the solder's not moving on to something you're wanting it to move on to it's generally because it hasn't got hot enough so just give it a moment wait till the component heats up and then do the soldering stuff's getting a little bit fiddly we just need to make sure that we don't accidentally put too much solder on and spread the solder onto one of the neighboring pins and accidentally create a bridge okay i've got a little six pin single row socket which needs to go into j5 here so i'm just going to put that in now i can't really bend the pins of this because the pins aren't very long so i'm going to have to hold this one in position when i solder it and that starts to become a little bit tricky because here i am i've got one hand holding this in place i've got one hand with a soldering iron how do i get the solder onto it um and i could transfer the solder onto my iron so i've got a nice big blob of solder on the end of my iron here but because that flux is now burned away it's not going to it's not going to stick very well and it actually did stick then but normally won't stick very well so there are a couple of different ways you can do it first of all you can get yourself uh something to actually uh hold them in position you've got things like the third hand type holders that you can use when you're soldering that will hold things in position another thing you can do and this is a little trick that i use quite a bit i use a good quality flux you'll find information in the description and you will find a lot of information about flux in my first beginner's guide to soldering video what you can do is you can put a little bit of flux not much just a tiny little bit of flux that's way more than i needed onto one of these pins you can then get some solder onto the tip of your iron now i can hold this in position i can do that and what's going to happen is that flux is going to help that solder flow from the end of my iron onto that pin and that's basically enough just to get that held in position for me to then go in and solder the rest of the pins the normal way that joint is a little bit ugly so i'm just going to give it a tiny bit of flux and just redo it and i'll just neaten it up there okay so there's my little socket in place i also have this little power socket and this is how we're actually going to get power to the device um this we're just following the layout of the screen printing you can see that just goes there like that and once again we've got another one of these things we need to sort of hold in position so i'm going to do my little trick again i'm going to put a little bit of flux then i'm going to get some solder onto the end of my iron transfer it onto the pin using that flux there we go and that's that's held that into position and then we can do the other two these are quite large pins so they're going to take a little while to get hot so i just need to be patient make sure they get nice and hot before putting the solder on them okay and now we move on to some of these more interesting things i've got first of all a socket here and that socket is going to go in this position here this is u1 and you can see there's a little cut out on the side there and there's a little cut out on the side of this socket and i just need to get them to line up with the benefit of hindsight i probably should have put this socket in before putting these capacitors in because they're quite close to this socket now but i have been able to get that to fit in there so that's fine i'm just gonna solder a couple of these pins using my little flux method that's enough to just hold that in position to now solder the rest of them when you're soldering components with lots of pins like this always be super super careful check double check triple check to make sure that you've put them on the right way because if you've got them on the wrong way these are a real pain in the neck to desolder and remove now we have to put this led readout in place now this one's a little bit tricky because the same pins on both sides and i'm not entirely sure of the orientation of this now it's got the little decimal places here so i would assume that if we were looking at this this way around with that riding up that way that it would go around that way but there is another way that i could check and over on the back here there's a little tiny writing there that says 12 telling me that's pin 12 and there's little tiny writing here with one telling me that's pin one and when we look at these you can see one of these is square and the square will be indicating pin one so i know i need to get that pin one there lining up with pin one there so let's just get him in position okay there he is okay so that should theoretically be the whole thing built oh this has got a little protective bit of plastic on the top we're going to whip that off there we are going to get rid of the plastic and then we've also got this this is essentially like a firmware chip so all of the brains of the outfit of how this whole thing works are all stored on this chip here so this now needs to go into that socket they've obviously made it removable in case there's maybe a revision of firmware in the future you could swap one chip out and put another one in or you could take it out for reprogramming or whatever the case may be so i'm just going to whip this out and once again we can see a little notch out on the end there and that needs to line up with a little notch out on the end here so we're going to just very carefully put that inside here just want to be very careful here that i don't bend any pins while i'm putting this in it's very snug fit i believe we're in place so that should theoretically be the kit ready to go we just need to give it some power and see if it works right so the instructions say that i can run this off anywhere between 8 and 16 volts so you know maybe a 9 volt battery would work quite well for this i've actually got it connected up to a power supply 9 volts at the moment so we're now going to switch it on and see what happens okay right well i've got i assume the p here uh refers to picofarads and i'm just going flickering between zero one and two so that's uh that's a promising sign so i have a little button on here for zero so i can press that to zero the device so it knows what uh when it's reading nothing there at all so it can calibrate itself okay let's test him out so i've got a 120 microfarad uh 16 volt capacitor here and i'm just going to pop him in there and it's reading 116 that's well within the tolerance 120 there so it's a 120 microfarad capacitor so that's doing its job let's try another one i've got a 470 let's pop him in there bit fiddly there we go and he is 481 microfarad so he's definitely again within sort of uh 10 of uh what the capacitor is supposed to be so it's actually doing its job so that's absolutely fantastic i'm really really pleased with the way that's worked out now one last thing i would recommend doing is actually just flipping the board over and giving this underside a bit of a clean just to get rid of any residual flux that's been left on the board so i've just got some isopropyl alcohol here on a toothbrush and i'm just going to give that a bit of a wipe just get rid of all that old flux just grab a paper towel give that a bit of a dry that's just so the finished product can be a little bit neater so not only have i had a bit of fun with soldering i've also built something useful please feel free to leave any comments and thank you for watching and finally to sergey maximov who said that 90 of video is showing a face of unknown fat guy who was soldered to wire sergey my name is bruce so not unknown anymore

Channel: Branchus Creations

Views: 47,958

Keywords: soldering, electronics, soldering for beginners, soldering tutorial, beginners guide to soldering, learn to, electronic soldering, beginners, learn to solder, intro to soldering, how to solder, soldering wires, soldering station, diy, soldering iron, soldering tips, solder, flux, tutorial, how to, soldering kits, soldering kits for beginners, electronic components

Id: BPuH1Z2npoQ

Length: 33min 17sec (1997 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 11 2021