Just in case you imagine that those of us who write for Hackaday are among the elite of engineering talent who never put a foot wrong and whose benches see a succession of perfectly executed builds and amazing hacks, let me disabuse you of that notion with an ignominious failure of my own.

I was building an electronic kit, a few weeks ago. It’s a modular design with multiple cards on a backplane, though since in due course you’ll see a review of it here I’ll save you its details until that moment. In my several decades of electronic endeavours I have built many kits, so this one as a through-hole design on the standard 0.1″ pitch should have presented me with no issues at all. Sadly though it didn’t work out that way.

Things started to go wrong towards the end of the build, I noticed that the temperature regulator on my soldering iron had failed at some point during its construction. Most of it had thus been soldered at a worryingly high temperature, so I was faced with a lot of solder joints to go over and rework in case any of them had been rendered dry by the excessive heat.

In due course when I powered my completed kit up, nothing worked. It must have been the extra heat, I thought, so out came the desolder braid and yet again I reworked the whole kit. Still no joy. Firing up my oscilloscope I could see things happening on its clock and data lines so there was hope, but this wasn’t a kit that was responding to therapy. A long conversation with the (very patient) kit manufacturer left me having followed up a selection of avenues, all to no avail. By this time a couple of weeks of on-and-off diagnostics had come and gone, and I was getting desperate. Somehow I’d cooked this thing with my faulty iron, and there was no way to find the culprit.

Continue reading “Fail Of The Week: Where’s Me Jumper?” →