First soldering experience!

This week we had a guest professor, Mitch Altman, creator of “TV B Gone” and learned how to solder by putting together a small electronic light kit! Mitch has been staying in Allen Hall on campus this semester to teach workshops to all different kinds of students. He told us about his company, Cornfield Electronics, and how his primary product is his remote that turns off televisions around the world, “TV-B-Gone.” His inspiration for the remote was when he was in a restaurant once and no one was socializing, they were all just casually glancing at the screens to avoid conversation. He wanted to find a way to secretly turn off these TV’s and was able to do just that by copying the off code from many different remotes. The workshop he taught us on Monday was all about soldering, an activity completely foreign to me before his class!

We started off by plugging in our soldering irons, which looked almost like electric screwdrivers. Mitch warned us not to touch any of the metal because it would eventually heat up to 350° F. The solder was a small strip of metal that we would be melting into the wires of the light kit, connecting the wires to the circuit board so that electricity could flow through the entire board. Some of the pieces in the kit did not matter which direction they were placed in however as we continued on we had to pay attention to the positive and negative ends for some parts. After we had all assembled our kits, Mitch began to explain to us how we could change the series of lights through the microchip and how to edit to code for it. It actually was not very difficult as long as you knew where you were starting in the code and a small change in it could cause a completely different color to appear.

As mentioned before, I had no idea what soldering was before this workshop. What I took away from it was that solder can act almost as a metallic glue so that electricity can flow from one part to another without being disrupted. I have not worked with electronics in the arduino section of the FabLab yet but I think having this workshop prepared me well for what is to come in the next few weeks. As my group continues with our tuner for our final project we will have to add a light kit to the design to display whether the frequency is in tune or not. By learning how to solder and modify our circuit boards, we could even take our light kits that we built and just change them, however I like keeping mine on my desk for now, it’s a very cool thing to show friends. I’m learning so many new skills in this class so far and while it is moving pretty fast, I am very glad to be taking this as a freshman and learning about so many resources I can use at the university in the future.

3 thoughts on “First soldering experience!

  1. I think knowing where to start in the code just the beginning of a whole new world out there! And now that you know how to solder, the possibilities of cool new hacker items to be made has greatly increased.

  2. Mitch is really a practitioner. His story is really inspiring. I admire his spirit that when you want to change something, you work on your own to make it happen. And I think knowing how to solder and write code definitely allows me to have more possibilities.

  3. Learning Mitch’s story and how far he has come was really inspiring, and it also shows how much one can learn on his/her own time with electronics. TV-B-Gone is such a cool concept because we think and spend so much time look for a certain TV’s remote can be solved by knowing the simple science behind it. I agree, this class is really teaching us so many skills which I’m sure we all will use in the future!

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