8 March, 2010 in Engineering, University by Aonghas

Soldering 101

The back of my board showing the soldered components

Today I had my second induction lab in the Engineering workshop. Last week we learned how to construct a circuit on a breadboard and today’s lab was all about the art of soldering. Again my session was scheduled for 10am and I made it just on time before the lab started. The teaching assistant who was leading the workshop was a Chinese man (I didn’t catch his name) who, from the sounds of it, has been running these labs for quite some time. He gave us a demonstrated tour around the soldering workshop and explained all the different machines. He then sat down at one of the tables and taught us how to solder a component to a circuit board. The brief instructions can be summarised in a few steps:

How to solder a component to a circuit board:

1. Insert the legs of the component (eg. resistor) into the holes of the circuit board.
2. Place the tip of the hot soldering iron so that it touches one of the component legs and the copper track on the circuit board and hold for a couple of seconds.
3. Using your free hand, move the end of the solder coil towards the tip of the soldering iron and gently press in until the solder melts.
4. Allow the molten solder to fill the hole and encompass the component leg before removing the coil of solder.
5. Leave the tip of the soldering iron in place for another couple of seconds before removing.

Don't I look groovy with my safety glasses on!

At each of our workstations, we had a coil of solder (with its own flux), a Weller solding iron with a temperature display, a magnification overhead lamp, a fume extractor, a box of tools (that we didn’t end up using) and a metal sponge to clean the soldering iron tip. We got to solder random resistors and capacitors to a holed circuit board just to practise, as well as solder an IC chip to the board as well. We also learned the different ways to remove solder, including the copper wick and the suction pen tool thing. Overall it was a pretty fun lab and I’m looking forward to designing and soldering real circuit boards that actually do something!

5 March, 2010 in Engineering, University by Aonghas

Breadboard

As part of Second Year Electrical and Computer Engineering, students have to attend an induction tutorial in the lab to get familiar with some of the devices and materials that will be used throughout the course. This morning I had my induction lab at 10am in Undergraduate Lab 3 (UG3). To begin with, we were given a talk by a guy named Rogan (I think?) about the Regulations for use of IT Equipment within the ECE Department. He basically outlined the rules of computer use, and told us not to play games online, look at porn or download any movies/television programmes etc. Pretty self-explanatory really. He told us about one time when a student was caught downloading a Harry Potter movie and tried to justify the download by explaining how it related to his coursework. Although that seemed funny to me at the time, Rogan spoke with a serious tone so I refrained myself from making any comical gestures.

We had quite a few things connected to our breadboard.

The crux of the lab was spent using these things called “breadboards”. I hadn’t seen anything like it before but apparently they’re quite common. We worked in pairs and my partner was a girl called Reya (sorry if I got that wrong!). She’s another student doing Computer Systems like me – I’m slowly meeting more people who are in Computer Systems which is reassuring. The basic outline of the lab was to get familiar with using a breadboard and connecting components to make a circuit. We got given a lab manual with detailed instructions, but there was a lot of background reading at the beginning which we just glossed over. Mr. Rob Champion was supervising us for today’s lab, along with several teaching assistants who floated around to help us when we needed it.

The lab induction tutorial detailed instructions to design an RC band-pass filter and amplifier. The circuit was split up into four sections, each section building on the one previous. The first section of the tutorial was the Current Amplifier. We had to play around with the function generator, multimeter and oscilloscope to get the correct readings of voltages and currents, but first we had to plug in all the resistors the BC639 transistor to the breadboard (don’t worry, I don’t even know what a BC639 transistor is either). It took a bit of time to get used to using the breadboard but after a while I became more comfortable with it. By the end of the tutorial we had only completed nearly two of the four sections, but they weren’t expecting us to finish everything and I think we put in a pretty solid effort!

A bit of a blurry photo of me and our breadboard.

There were only three lectures for me after the lab today, everything except MM2. Just quietly, I think MM2 is my least favourite paper right now. I don’t know if it’s just because we’re doing statistical analysis at the moment, but hopefully once we get into some REAL maths it’ll be more enjoyable. On the flip side, my most favourite paper would have to be COMPSYS201 (Computer Engineering) because our lecturer is quite funny (the Elmo T-shirt guy!) and I really like the content in the course. Computer Engineering was our last lecture for the day and afterwards I went to the gym since I missed it yesterday.

Tonight at youth group Calum led worship with the song Indescribable. I played the accompaniment on the piano, well tried to! Tonight’s topic was Bible Study and it was Fiona who led the lesson. We read out of Philippians chapter 2 – looking at Jesus’ humility and how we should be like Him. During our sharing time, we talked about our experiences with being humble, and putting others first before ourselves.

Week one of Uni is over already. Time just goes way too fast.