This page will give you a step by step guide to soldering your Arduino Shield. I have soldered quite a lot of them and this is the order which I think is the easiest. It is best to keep it close to your soldering iron to make sure you don’t forget something, so here is a QR code to bring it up on your smartphone:
So lets get started! You will need:
- A BrewPi Arduino shield kit
- A soldering iron
- A tip cleaner (I recommend golden curl over wet sponge)
- Solder
- A side cutter
From now on this guide will be nothing but pictures with a description! I think pictures are much more helpful and prevent errors so this guide has a lot of pictures. To help with opening the page on portable devices it is broken up into 5 pages, 15 images per page.
This is what you bought from the shop: a PCB with SMT components soldered and a bag of through hole parts. Go ahead and empty the bag on your desk.
The PCB consists of 3 boards which are connected by tabs. Separate the boards by breaking them.
Break off the tabs that are left behind.
You now have 3 boards: The main shield, the LCD backpack and the rotary encoder breakout board.
These boards will all be connected when you are done.
A quick primer on soldering… Step 1: press the tip of your soldering iron against both the pad and the pin.
Step 2: Add solder. Do not put solder on your tip first! The flux will evaporate before you start. Push the solder against the pad/pin.
Step 3: Wait until the solder flows to the entire pad. You can add a little more solder to help if it doesn’t flow nicely, because this also adds new flux.
The result should be a shiny concave joint. If the joint is dull or pointy, the flux has evaporated. Work quicker or lower your soldering temperature.
This picture is just to show you what good solder joints look like: shiny, concave and covering the whole pad. We will get to this board later.
The bottom of page 1,
“This picture is just to show you what good solder joints look like: shiny, concave and covering the whole pad. We will get to this board later.”
I think you mean convex
I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these units, loving following the progress!
No I am pretty sure I mean concave…
I quote from this guide:
The whole of the joint itself is a convex structure COD yes, but in the way Elco uses it here it makes sense. They’re talking about the cross sectional profile of the joint in which case it’s convex. If it were concave it would look bulbous like a mushroom. I too for a moment thought hrmm…concave you say until I considered this interpretation.
Boy I really buggered that up and swapped some of the terms. The joint stands off the board = convex, but here the term concave describes the profile of the joint. If it were convex it would be a bulbous ball…the characteristic of a cold solder joint.
I’ll second concave as correct.
smooth volcano shape
Nice setup ! I`m currently making it … just had to buy a SD card big enough for all the setup. My 4GB was to small. 8GB seems to be ok.
ugh, i soldered the ICP header on the LCD board on the wrong side, and my solder sucker is stuck
ah well
Been there myself… Any attempt to get it off will probably ruin the connector, so you will have to buy another one. Luckily they are very common. To get it off, you can also make the pin side one big blob of solder, so you can heat all 10 at once.
You could leave it and assemble the cable in a way that works I think, but it will be very high.
Yeah i figured i could just flip the connector and try to bend the header for the LCD to allow for some room to the connector, that or break off some of the plastic around the header and solder wires to the pins and just create a connector out of it that doesnt require so much height.
Use a heat gun. Heat it carfully up and give it a little “hit” to the edge of something. With a little practice you can get it out from there. If you use it too much, you will ruin your print… For emergency use only.
Dont have a heat gun and im not too keen on ruining the print, im going to try something tommorow and evalute after that.