Ice Tube Clock Kit Built!
For Christmas this year, I received one of Adafruit‘s Ice Tube Clock kits. It is a really neat project that is basically a PCB that Adafruit designed along with a bunch of parts (resistors, capacitors, etc.) that you must solder onto it in order to build the kit. It is a good introduction to building electronics, as it teaches better soldering skills and has a few hints as to what each part does. I took some extra time while making the kit to understand how voltage boosters work and a number of other parts. It is a great kit for an introduction to DIY electronics.
I started out a little overwhelmed. I laid all the parts on the table and just began reading the instructions. The instructions that Adafruit gives for this kit are very easy to follow and intuitive.
You can see below that I did a poor job of soldering the DC jack onto the PCB. I later went back and re-soldered those three joints.
The only issue I had during the build phase was that I forgot to solder in a resistor, which caused a little bit of chaos as I attempted to figure out my mistake. Luckily, no damage was done to the kit.
About 3-4 hours later, I finished the kit. The finished product turned out quite nicely.
I now have an extra edition to what I like to call my Linux Shrine!
Above, you will see:
Binary clock
Hard drive
Laptop running Gentoo Linux
Router running DD-WRT
Cable modem
Arduino (inactive, waiting for friend to return my breadboard)
Ice tube clock
Tux plushie
Knitted penguin from my sister
Thanks to Adafruit for the great kit and instructions! Thanks to my family for the great Christmas gift.
Ok, looks like you are using too much solder. The key is to heat the area first and then touch the solder to the point for connection. Look up “cold solder joint” . This implies a poor connection and occurs when you touch the solder to the soldering iron. Poor fusion occurs and you have high resistance. Overall your project looks great. This is the kind of stuff my friend Fred from Hersey PA used to do while we wre at Clemson, except there were not kits were from Radio Shack.
I actually resoldered those joints and used much less solder.