Soldering basics

Have you ever soldered before? If your answer is “yes”, you’ll probably know what you’re doing and you can just fastly skim through this intro paragraph.

In case you’ve never soldered before, please take 10 minutes of your time and look at one of the following how-to-solder guides:

• Adafruit’s video tutorial featuring Collin Cunningham– a tutorial featuring Collin Cunningham, a super charismatic electronics guru
• Adafruit’s standard soldering tutorial– A great and thorough video tutorial. An absolute must-read, even if you know how to solder. Make sure to check the “common soldering mistakes” section at the end.
• Sparkfun’s video soldering tutorial– Another well made how-to-solder video tutorial.
• Sparkfun’s standard soldering tutorial– Well written tutorial made by Sparkfun To sum all of these tutorials up, making a good soldering joint is very important and can be quite easy if you follow this simple rule: your soldering joint has to look like a small “volcano” and mustn’t be a tiny ball or blob or soldering. A bubbly blob-like soldering joint is a sign of too much solder or a need of more heat (you have to resolder the joint).
  
  All of this is shown on this awesome picture by Adafruit industries (thank you Adafruit!):
  
  

Motivational tip from Albert (the guy that designed the MAKERbuino)

Soldering is an essential skill if you want to become an electronics ninja one day.

Your soldering iron is a magical wand, only instead of enabling you to fight black magic, it gives you the power to create unique intelligent electronic devices from scratch.

Don’t get frustrated by soldering failure, it’s just a matter of practice. You’ll get better at it over time by soldering kits like MAKERbuino and working on other fun projects you decide to make. I know how frustrating it can be when something doesn’t work from the first try. The truth is, you’ll have to get used to it because you’ll get lots of that in the world of DIY electronics.

And please, don’t worry, In the worst-case scenario (your MAKERbuino not working) we’ll make it work together.

Good luck and keep making!

Pro tip

We suggest that you start building MAKERbuino when you’re fresh because the process of assembly can take up to 5 hours depending on your soldering skills (in other words, don’t start building it at 2 AM).