On Friday afternoon, I teamed up with Katy, Jojo and Erin to tackle the Soldering and Digital Input/Output labs. First, the Soldering Lab.

I gathered up all of the necessary “ingredients”:

I stripped the 2 ends of the hook-up wire, using the wire stripper. Because I had problems loosening the nut on the wire stripper to adjust it, I just clipped carefully. You can feel when the plastic insulation gives way without cutting the wire, so in a way you don’t have to adjust it.

Next, I created little loops in the wire with the needle-nose pliers and hooked them through the holes in the 2 switch prongs…

… and clipped the whole thing to the helping hands. One “hand” held the switch, the other the wire.

Then I soldered the wire to the switch. This was easier than I thought; basically I held the soldering iron tip to where the wire and the switch meet for an absurdly long time (almost 2 minutes) to make sure they were both nice and hot. Then when I poked the connection with the solder, it simply melted all over both pieces. (I do not have a soldering action-shot because I did not have enough hands.) It seems like it’s better to have a lot of solder rather than too little, even if it isn’t too aesthetically pleasing.

This is what the completed switch looked like after soldering the other wire: (this is actually Jojo’s switch, because I disassembled mine before remembering I had to take a picture)

To test the join, I brought out the multimeter. I turned the dial to the little wi-fi radio-esque symbol, plugged in the probes to the correct holes (they have to click in with a little force), and touched one end of each of the probes to each wire end. The first time, it didn’t work. Duh, I had to turn the switch on. Also It’s important to remove the plastic caps from the probe ends (cough, cough). Then it made this buzzing, beeping noise. Success!

Here is a picture of Jojo doing a continuity test (but testing an individual join rather than the entire switch + wire system):

This entire lab took about an hour, and nobody burned themselves.

One lab down, one more to go.