3/23/2026 - Finished soldering

I finally finished my Blinky board by soldering everything together, and it feels really good to see it actually working.

Placing all the components on the two boards (two, because the kit had two of every component) took me almost an hour. It was highly stressful making sure every resistor value was correct (today I learned how to read the colour codes, through a website calculator that is) and the leds and capacitors were in the correct orientation. The pins kept falling out if I flipped the board even a bit, which was annoying, and I ended up having to tape everything very delicately.

Then came the soldering… my first time ever. It definitely didn't go as smoothly as I planned; it took me around three and half hours to fully solder both boards. I struggled learning to tin my soldering iron, that was a big journey in and of itself. A few of the joints are still not great; they're kind of starving or uneven, but they work.

One thing I didn't expect was how messy the flux would be. The cheap flux I used left a greasy residue all over the board, which made it look, and feel, really bad even after finishing. I spent around 40 minutes cleaning it up, wiping it down with plenty of isopropyl alcohol so it wouldn’t feel sticky anymore.

After everything was done, plugging it in and seeing the leds light up felt amazing. This was a really fun (and frustrating) first experience with soldering.

Video!