Pressing Charges
What this is about
This unit was about soldering a pcb together, something I am very well versed in at this point. We had to solder together a Gameboy-type handheld game, this was a simple process, but it used many parts I hadn't soldered, such as a USB port. The purpose of this was to better understand how to through-hole solder, as well as how components should be soldered when using through-hole mount soldering. This project also provided a nice little game when you were finished, which is a pretty cool reward.
Building the game
Gathering the components
To begin, I made sure I had all the large componenets, which I did. Once I knew I had these components, I looked for all the smaller electrical components to see if I had all of them, which again I did.
Beginning soldering
The first parts I soldered were the buzzer, the on/off button, the capacitor, the triode, and the 1k resistor. These were all pretty easy to solder, but I didn't initially realize that you need to lay the diode down, but I fixed that and was now set to move on.
Front and back of the board at this point
Next I soldered the other buttons onto the board, there were no issues wiht this step, everything went perfectly. One suggestion I do have though is to bend 2 pins opposite of each other to hold them in place.
Front and back of the board at this point
Next I soldered the USB and the number display. I had to make sure the number display was correctly oriented, or else it wouldn't work. I lined it up with how the board looked underneath and that worked. The USB was a bit of a struggle, because some of the holes that needed to be soldered were very large, and in turn very difficult to ensure a fully good connection.
Front and back of the board at this point
Now I moved onto the IC holder, which would elevate the IC so that the diode and capacitor could fit underneath. There were no issues with this step, the hardest part was simply getting all the pins in the holes.
Now I moved onto the LED pannels, which is where many others had some problems. I figured that since there were numbers on part of the LEDS, they would have to line up with the numbers on the board, similarly to how I did the number display. Theses were a pretty tight fit, but the snug fit looked very nice.
Front and back of the board at this point
No the board was fully finished I just placed the IC into the holder, and built the casing around it. I had to bend some of the pins in order to make them fit, I just tried to be very careful since they would snap if I wasn't. THe hardest part of building the casing was taking the paper off the acrylic, as well as keeping it together while placing all the components together.
Video of it working!
IMG_0268.MOVIssues
I didn't have too many issues here. The main ones I encountered were trying to place the USB in the board, because two of the holes was just simply massive. Another small issue I had in the process was when installing the LED matrices, it was somewhat difficult to get the both of them flush with the board, but with enough wiggling I was able to get both of them down.