Happy Octopus Eating Taco and Fries
As a short break from larger scale projects, I decided to get some more SMD soldering practice. When I was at Supercon I received these little soldering kits which were designed to the simple "Shitty Add-On" specification. It's a way for people to get a simple start with PCB projects made with aesthetics in mind as well as functionality, headlined by sophisticated #badgelife creations.
As fitting their simple nature, all I have to start with are little zip lock bags of parts. The first hint towards assembly instructions were printed on the circuit board: the text @Michelle4904 which pointed to the Twitter page of Michelle Grau and a Google Doc of assembly instructions. One notable fact of these kits is that there were no extra parts to replace any that might accidentally fly off into space, which meant I had to be extra careful handling them. Fortunately, the parts were larger than my most recent SMD LED project and while I did drop a few, these were large enough they did not fly too far and I was able to recover them.
I started with the fries. It was slow going at first because I was very afraid of losing parts. But I gradually built up a feel for handling them and things got gradually faster. After a bit of experimentation, I settled on a pattern of:
- Tin one pad with a small blob of solder.
- Place the SMD component next to the blob, and melt the blob again to connect them.
- Solder the other end of SMD component to other pad.
This is the rapid start portion of the learning curve - every LED felt faster and easier than the last. Soon the pack of fries were finished and illuminated. I was a little confused as to why the five LEDs were green, I had expected them to be yellow. Maybe they are seasoned fries with parsley or something?
Tangential note: when I visit Red Robin I like to upgrade to their garlic herbed fries.
Once the fries were done, I then moved on to the taco which had a denser arrangement of components. It was an appropriate next step up in difficulty.
Once completed, I have a taco with yellow LEDs for the shell (the same yellow I would have expected in the fries...), red LED for tomato, green LED for lettuce, and white LED for sour cream. It's a fun little project.
Tangential note: Ixtaco Taqueria is my favorite taco place in my neighborhood.
The last zip lock bag has a smiling octopus and it was the easiest one to solder. It appears the original intention was to be an 1-to-4 expansion board for shitty add-ons, but if so, the connector genders are backwards.
No matter, I'll just solder the taco and fries permanently to my happy octopus tentacles. In order to let this assembly of PCBs stand on its own, I soldered one of the battery holders I designed for my KISS Tindies.
And here's a happy octopus enjoying Taco Tuesday and a side of fries.
