Society of Robots - Robot Forum

Mechanics and Construction => Mechanics and Construction => Topic started by: ivern on February 23, 2012, 01:04:45 PM

Title: Long solder bridges on perforated board
Post by: ivern on February 23, 2012, 01:04:45 PM

I'm a pretty big soldering newbie, and I'm trying to build the circuit for the $50 robot.  So far, soldering individual joints hasn't been much of a problem.  What's been difficult is creating the long (2-gap) solder bridges required to connect the microcontroller to the sensor and servo data pins.  With some care I can get one or two done, and then invariable the next bridge melds into one of the existing ones and I end up destroying everything just to clean things up and break the undesirable connection.

Any tips I could use / videos I could watch to learn how to properly make these 'long' solder bridges? (where I'm connecting two non-contiguous pins with just solder)

Thanks in advance.

Title: Re: Long solder bridges on perforated board
Post by: rbtying on February 23, 2012, 04:28:40 PM

I cheat and use clipped component leads to help guide the solder, or short 30AWG wire for point-to-point. It's easy to do, doesn't usually cost much of anything, and has no real disadvantage other than the need to find said component leads or wire.

Title: Re: Long solder bridges on perforated board
Post by: joe61 on February 23, 2012, 04:53:29 PM

I do the same thing. I find that a good pair of tweezers really helps a lot.

Joe

Title: Re: Long solder bridges on perforated board
Post by: ivern on February 24, 2012, 06:31:58 PM

Thanks, this worked like a charm once I figured out how to get the wire to stay in place.  I used some thin copper wire that I stripped, and also switching to a much better iron didn't hurt (one with a thin tip and temperature control instead of the one I was using, which was literally the cheapest one I found, was always either too cold or too hot, and had a tip the size of a baseball bat).