Dome Lights
March was a pretty quiet month, I didn't have much money to buy any parts because I had a lot of unexpected bills, and I was pretty gutted that I couldn't do much on my build. To my surprise I had completely forgotten that even thought I couldn't order all the parts for the Dome Lights due to some of them being in sales and the sales ending when I went to buy them, I did order some parts! They turned up and I began soldering. Now please bear in mind that I haven't done any form of electronics since 2010-11. I did get an A* in my GCSE for Electronics but I'm pretty sure it's because I was difficult and chose to use surface mount components instead of normal ones.
And I broke them...
The first board didn't go so well... the soldering was rubbish, things didn't line up properly, and they went in wrong and to top it all off, after being sent some IC Chip holders by my good friend Chris from the UK Builders group, I soldered one of those in backwards and I would have had more luck ripping a boulder apart with my bare hands than get that sucker out without breaking the board. So I've decided to get a new FLD. The second FLD and the RLD were better for some reason. Soldering wasn't as good as what it could be, but I was more excited to get my LEDs soldered to take people's warnings about taking my time. First bit of advice to new builders "CALM DOWN!" seriously take your time, do one LED at a time if you have too, the results will be better but again most lessons that we learn are when we have made the mistakes.
More break-age!
There are some components that I have that I can't do anything with such as the Arduino Mini, I don't have any of the bits to solder that too yet so that's just waiting patiently in my drawer, I will get round to ordering the rest at some point!