Home About Gallery Blog Fab Academy Contact # Soldering Training  Recently I had college students request special soldering training to learn how to solder properly. Its always great to see students go out of their way to learn and work hard to improve.  I started curating a 4 hour course to teach them how to solder. None of them have soldered anything before so they were complete begginers. I allocated 2 hours for through-hole soldering and 2 hours for surface mount soldering. The first and obvious step was teaching them about safety and the different tools you can use to solder and how to use them properly and safely. I also started out with them by giving them prototyping boards for them to experiment with soldering some random components.   I also design and milled a special PCB for them to solder that is very easy to debug uing just a power supply. The circuit has an led and it can be turned on using multiple different switches, buttons and sensors. This can be done by powering up the circuit from multiple different power pads with crocodile clips. Every pad means a different input controls the led. If the led didnt turn on at any point, we know the soldering related to that part is not good enough. I designed the circuit using Eagle and milling it using a monofab SRM20 milling machine on copper sheets.   This is a video showing how the circuit works. It contains a push button, a latch button, a tilt sensor and a light sensor. I gave the students the components and the diagram and they got to work. I was proud of how fast they picked the skill up. Only one of them had to adjust the soldering to get it to work. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kAL4YSQj3ls" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> For the surface mount day of the training I gave them PCBs for an attiny based microcontroller board i milled at the lab. The surface mount soldering was much trickier for them and it took longer for them to get the hold of it.