0.5. Student Bootcamp¶
This week, we focused on improving our soldering skills and started to set up our website before Fab Academy starts.
Soldering¶
First, we soldered an IR distance sensor to improve our soldering skills. The board involved both through-hole and surface mount soldering. Most of us have soldered using both of these methods in our electrical engineering course, but it was useful to try different techniques, such as solder paste and flux paste.
The IR distance sensor board was fairly easy to solder because it had fairly large chips and components. The next board we soldered was a sashakit Arduino. The sashakit was much more difficult to solder because it had a lot smaller components and the smaller, four-sided ATMEGA chip. It was also entirely surface mount soldering. For most of the components, I just used normal surface mount techniques, but for the chip, I used flux paste because of how small it was.
Burning the Sashakit¶
To burn the Sashakit, I used an Arduino Uno as a bootloader. I went on the GitHub documentation for sashakit, where there were instructions for burning the Sashakit with an Arduino Uno. There is an example sketch in the Arduino IDE called ArduinoISP, which I ran to bootload the Sashakit. I had to set the programmer under “tools” to Arduino as ISP and installed the program onto the Arduino Uno. I then ran “burn bootloader” under tools, and my sashakit was working. I ran a simple test program with the built-in LED, and it worked perfectly.
