Hardware Group Hot Plate

Magnifying glasses are a great idea

We had a great time at the Hardware Meetup this evening. Brian has designed a printed circuit board that lets us use a Raspberry Pi PICO to control a Hull Pixelbot. The board uses surface mount components and tonight we used a little hotplate to solder them all in place. Stage one is to put some solder paste on each of the connections. Then put the components in position and finally heat the board up so that the solder melts and forms the connections. You also get some really interesting movement of the components themselves as they float in the molten solder and surface tension pulls them into exactly the right position.

Great fun.