My new GERTBoard an extension board for the Raspberry Pi GPIO interface arrived after a long wait this week. I brushed off my soldering iron all ready to put it to together only to find it had some surface mount components that I would need some more tools than just my fingers to attach things to the board.
So the assembly of the GERTBoard is on hold for the time being, but I couldn’t help noticing the way the kit was packaged. Element 14 was it really necessary to pack every component individually?
Still I was still pretty excited, the soldering iron was plugged in so I decided to pull out my MHVBoard kit. The MHVBoard is a Arduino clone from the Make Hack Void hackerspace in Canberra. I contributed to the projects page on Pozible eons ago and they sent me a R7 kit, I never got around to building it though, so I figured what better opportunity than the present?
I get started soldering my components on and was surprised to learn my soldering skills after not being used for so many years have really gone to the dogs. The first few components were a struggle and at more than one time I contemplated just giving up, but I persevered and almost completed it. Until I realised I was missing a 10uF titanium capacitor and a Schottky diode, but had an extra 110 ohm resistor. Not sure what happened there but it looks like neither of the kits are getting built today 🙁
