Building competence and capability

I am very bad at soldering still. I'm vastly improved from where I've been. But it is not a strong suit of mine. Wish it was.

Something that immensely helped my soldering was going from one of those basic fairly broad-tipped electrician-style soldering irons from the hardware store and getting the not perfect but much more precise TS-101 (or some variant). Electronics and soldering big stuff are quite different ventures.

One of my clients sent over a device that we are putting Nerves on. They gave me good info and schematics and went "hey, bridge these test points when you plug in power and you'll get the boot mode". So to be able to do this I soldered some wires onto it. I did a decent job. Everything worked great.

For about a week. Then it started to fail to go into the boot mode. The board was on my desk, peeled out of its case and at the whims of the USB-C cable and had the two leads for the resets as well as three leads for the serial console. Investigating I saw one cable soldered to a test point wiggle. And when I took it off to resolder it, it came off. It took me a moment to realize it brought the test pad with it..

I've since been told that smarter people than I glob hot glue onto these types of solder jobs to prevent this. I did not realize how easy it was to wrench that copper from the board. I was kind of proud that my solder joint helded but it did come off by ripping up a copper trace. I was lucky in that there was another decent chunk of copper I could solder to without much issue.

Later the other one came off, also with the test point. I had already ordered the PCBite kit. Now I have a PCBite probe hold one reset point the other one is still okay soldered. Those little plinths hold it quite steady which makes the plug/unplug of the USB-C cable much less sketch. I did look for a full off/on switch for USB-C but have yet to find one.

Let's just say I'm glad to have more appropriate tools. I also asked the client to send a backup board since I've been rough with this and I think it just makes sense to have a backup so work doesn't stall due to hardware problems.

I don't feel at my most competent when things go wrong like this. Everyone who does electronics that I've talked to have essentially nodded in recognition. I'm not alone. And in this case I could recover from all of it. The second lead was scarier. I couldn't have fixed that without the PCBite. I think I'm tapping into the top of a via. All surrounded by copper that I don't want to connect to.

A more approachable piece of advice if doing Nerves. Have an FTDI cable or two handy. Also knows as a serial adapter. Often referred to as "a UART" or serial console. You can find UART RX and UART TX on the RPi pinout. This is where you get kernel output, can debug boot problems, can get at the IEx prompt without ever connecting over the network. It is ridiculously useful if you ever need to customize a system. Benjamin "lostkobrakai" Milde told me he usually only uses that terminal for Nerves devices and I can see why. It doesn't disconnect on reboot. It's just there. Very reliable.

Appropriate tools help a ton. I'm inching my way towards a bench power supply, a logic analyzer and eventually I suppose an oscilloscope. It also makes me think about this multi-purpose desk I have and I can see why someone like Jay Carlson has more than one desk surface. So quite possibly more benches. More lights. More storage. This office might lose a bit of it's social space in favor of just more varieties of work area.

I love that my work can mutate this much over the years. Having the time of my life with hardware, software and firmware.

Thank you for reading, I appreciate it.