FABSITE — FabISP

Floating House, Seattle.

Floating House.

Floating House

Step 2: Stuffing the Board

Once the traces were milled, we shop-vac'ed the board clean and gently abraded the surface with ultra-light sand paper to remove any copper burrs. Next we collected all of the tiny components we'd need to "stuff" (solder bits to) the board. Dealing with microscopic, unfamiliar, and sometimes unlabeled bits in a configuration whose sense was still mysterious, it was super helpful for orientation and workflow to: 1) list all components: (resistors, capacitors, oscillator, microcontroller etc.), 2) lay down a strip of double-sided tape alongside list, 3) collect components with tweezers and place beside names.

Worksheet Printout w/ Sticky Tape

Collecting Bits on Double-Sided Tape

What We Learned

a) Heating up the copper square (pad) beneath the piece you're about to solder is helpful to prime the flow. b) 1-1-thousand, 2-1-thousand, 3-1-thousand, 4-1-thousand is usually how long it took for the solder to melt when we used copper braid to wick the solder back up off the board. c) it's possible to accidently solder a piece vertically in the air (see photo). d) Flux looks like marmite. It's messy, but it works to help stubborn solder become mercurial again and wick up like liquid. e) soldering under a x7 power microscope is actually remarkably easy and satisfying. f) In the milling stage, think of x-min, y-min as the southwest (bottom left) corner of where you'd like the Modella to start milling. g) their are several parts that have directionality (they need to be in a certain orientation to work): 1) Diodes (D1, D2) have an anode (A) and cathode (C) end. Look for the tiny line that marks the cathode end. 2) Microcontroller (looks like piece of centipede) has a tiny dot that needs to be oriented to line up with R3 (upper left when hold board w/ USB on top).