FabLab is an exciting place to be at and it gets your creative juices flowing. This week as well we had our class at the FabLab. Last week we wired breadboards and used code to get our Arduinos working by uploading the code onto it. This week again our group was to learn a new way of working with Arduinos, that is the use of soldering technique. We joined the wires together by melting lead. The coding process is not a permanent way to join wires, however soldering is a permanent joint. It was much more challenging as there are many things that you need to keep in mind while soldering. This is a useful link that I found which tells you the do’s and don’t of the soldering process briefly.

“Soldering is a process in which two or more metal items are joined together by melting and then flowing a filler metal into the joint—the filler metal having a relatively low melting point. Soldering is used to form a permanent connection between electronic components.”

It took us the entire class time, which is 2 hours 40 minutes, to solder all the wires together. You can imagine now how tedious the soldering process is. The end result was the same as last week, the LED lights would light up according to the amount of brightness around it. The darker the light, the faster the LED lights would blink and the brighter the light the slower the LED blinks. It was just a different way of approaching it.

We have now acquired different skills to work with the Arduino and have become familiar with the entire process. This would be very helpful in our projects that we need to turn in at the end of this semester. Here is another link that I found interesting if someone wants to know more about the process of soldering and how it is done.