All in an afternoon’s work. Two Smaplers, built from kits. Our first kits, ever. Pictures. You came for the pictures, right?
A week ago, I bought two kits for an Arduino shield that had audio capabilities and a PS/2 connector. The kit was called SMAPLER. I intended to build the kit together with David, so I bought one extra for him, and then told him about it later. It was the right thing to do. He went out and bought a soldering station (a glorified name for a working soldering pen), and we set off a Saturday to build the kits.
After unboxing the soldering unit, it was a dream to work with. Disclaimer: I have never worked with any soldering station. Ever. All the presets were correct for our usage, and it just worked. (It was a DS50-Pu from Danish company RS.)
Being rather nervous to break hardware things that can never be repaired, I was at first a little apprehensive about soldering. But it just came naturally after a while. Really: things you do with your hands are learnt in the muscle memory. I guess.
What we misunderstood: The three pairs of capacitors (blue, square plastic tops, with two long legs) are, well… capacitors. Their names contain the strings “33” and “47” in them. That’s their nano-Farad values. And the one that does not contain any of those strings, is a 100 nF capacitor.
Now that there is a picture online (we googled, and by mere luck found as-yet-unpublished images on Blushingboy.org), it became clear (to us dolts) that those many trios of holes, named PA0-5 and PD0-5 are for optional extra connections. So, we didn’t have to anything about those holes. Cool.
An undocumented update to our printed partlist also confused us: the part CR5 (a 330u capacitor) has been changed to a 100u capacitor. The designer told me. There is no documentation, yet. Welcome to beta hardware. On the upside: it seems like it’s Creative Commons. “(cc) 2008” it says on the board. And I got an enlarged Eagle picture of the board, plus a partlist, and a circuit diagram.
Nugget of wisdom: Electrolytic capacitors have polarity. That is fit for a t-shirt. And: all electronic components’ design are explained belt-and-suspenders-style, and everything is an informational symbol. For instance, the wide stripe on the side of capacitors means “this side is the negative”. On that stripe there are often printed minus signs. Which, I have been unable to understand as minus characters, until I was told of the meaning of the stripe…
Making stuff can be exciting: After having soldered 12 pinheads in a row, I exhaled. Being so concentrated, and feeling successful, was exhausting. Getting better at soldering is hard, rewarding work. OK, not hard, but quite rewarding. (Pinheads. They are long rows of metal sticks, that act like short wires, thus connecting boards that sit on top of each other, like a circuit sandwich.)
By having two kits, we were able to make the first one very slowly, and then when that was done, we could do the other one. Quite a bit faster. Smapplerific!
Mounting opamps: Just be as violent as you’d be when mounting something inside a PC. You know, subtly coercive.
Mounting pinhead sections. Have your Arduino nearby, so you can see if the new board’s connectors fit into the Arduino’s header holes. Also: there are plastic knobs on the bases of the header sections. Pay attention, so you don’t mount these over the descriptive text on the board.
When browsing for information, I came across the page for the Motor Shield. It is a “bare printed circuit board”. That scared me, earlier today. After this session, it’s just… a few components you can slap on. It’s a personal transformation, from wimp to champ. At least, it feels that way.
At the upcoming Scandiland Arduino meetup, there’ll be code. Actual programs for this unit. As of now, I have no way of testing this thing out. I guess it’s part of that beta charm.