DerCoaster Review & Suggestions

#1 · 2023-12-25, 11:48

Quote from WillerZ on 2023-12-25, 11:48
Review

I bought DerCoaster, completed it successfully (to my surprise), and generally enjoyed the process. My only soldering experience before was with through-hole components and I would not say I am particularly great at that.

If you're attempting this, I'd suggest to check you can do the 4 biggest components from the soldering challenge before progressing to the other stuff.

The piece I found most difficult was the USB-C connector, I had solder-bridged pins initially and that took me a while with some desoldering equipment to sort it out.

I found that tinning all the pads first worked best for some kinds of components and soldering one pad then doing the other(s) worked best for some other components. I'm not going to say which because I'm pretty-sure it depends on your soldering iron, solder, flux and technique. I'm just going to say try both techniques out and see which you prefer for which kinds of component.

I would definitely want a smaller tip and thinner solder wire than I used today if I was going to do a lot more surface-mount work.

If you get some LEDs working but not others, you need to know it's a serial data protocol, so if you mess up the data out of LED 7 then LED 7 will work but LEDs 8 onwards will not. In this example you would need to check/repair all the connections on LED7 and all the connections on LED8 and then things should work.

Suggestions for Elmor/Roman:

I really liked the two-PCB design where they're interconnected by headers, that produces a nice end-result and raises the stakes on the alignment of components.

For the next soldering challenge, if there is one, here are my requests:

I would like probe points on traces attached to the soldering challenge resistor pads (still not connected to the main circuit) - this would let me validate that I have really attached the component electrically at both ends using my multimeter without getting a false positive because the multimeter probe is touching the end of the component.

I would like the challenge components to be non-zero resistors - particularly for the smaller components I would like to be sure that I have soldered the component correctly and not merely solder-bridged the PCB pads. If they had some resistance (and we had probe points) I could measure the resistance on my multimeter and validate my work that way.

Review

I bought DerCoaster, completed it successfully (to my surprise), and generally enjoyed the process. My only soldering experience before was with through-hole components and I would not say I am particularly great at that.

If you're attempting this, I'd suggest to check you can do the 4 biggest components from the soldering challenge before progressing to the other stuff.

The piece I found most difficult was the USB-C connector, I had solder-bridged pins initially and that took me a while with some desoldering equipment to sort it out.

I found that tinning all the pads first worked best for some kinds of components and soldering one pad then doing the other(s) worked best for some other components. I'm not going to say which because I'm pretty-sure it depends on your soldering iron, solder, flux and technique. I'm just going to say try both techniques out and see which you prefer for which kinds of component.

I would definitely want a smaller tip and thinner solder wire than I used today if I was going to do a lot more surface-mount work.

If you get some LEDs working but not others, you need to know it's a serial data protocol, so if you mess up the data out of LED 7 then LED 7 will work but LEDs 8 onwards will not. In this example you would need to check/repair all the connections on LED7 and all the connections on LED8 and then things should work.

Suggestions for Elmor/Roman:

I really liked the two-PCB design where they're interconnected by headers, that produces a nice end-result and raises the stakes on the alignment of components.

For the next soldering challenge, if there is one, here are my requests:

I would like probe points on traces attached to the soldering challenge resistor pads (still not connected to the main circuit) - this would let me validate that I have really attached the component electrically at both ends using my multimeter without getting a false positive because the multimeter probe is touching the end of the component.
I would like the challenge components to be non-zero resistors - particularly for the smaller components I would like to be sure that I have soldered the component correctly and not merely solder-bridged the PCB pads. If they had some resistance (and we had probe points) I could measure the resistance on my multimeter and validate my work that way.