Aug
23

Learn-2-Solder Meetup

By DW

James, Andrew, and I ran a learn-to-solder meetup in my garage this morning. A big thank you to my two co-organizers, the 7 makers that attended, and Dan L. and Jeff-O for loaning us a couple extra irons. Click through for deets…

This bunch looks serious about solder.

Following my Maker Meetup Design Pattern, we had 3 organizers. James, here, was the Subject Matter Expert. His primary job was to deliver the content.

Andrew was the Purchaser. His primary job was to procure supplies and gear.

I was the Communicator. My primary job was communicating with attendees and organizers. I think it worked out very well. It was the right amount of help during the session and the right amount for prepping the session. Much less stressful than the Metal Casting Meetup we did last month.

James explained the basics of soldering, then we got to work practising soldering some wire together.

Then we dove in on these great Wee Blinky kits from our good friend Dale Wheat from Texas.

I met Dale when I was down at Maker Faire in May, and I asked him about a kit that would be good for teaching beginners to solder. He put me on to the Wee Blinky kit. It’s an astable multivibrator which is a technical way of saying “something that constantly flips between two states”. A simple 10-component, through-hole kit, with a nice circuit board (plated through-holes). I paired this kit up with a nice AA battery holder from Digikey that has an integrated switch. The Wee Blinky can run from 3V to 9V, so it uses 1K resistors on the LEDs. To get the brightness we wanted at 3V, we swapped in 150 ohm resistors in place of the 1K parts.