Soldering Idiocy

The only person I allow myself to get really cross with is me. Today I had a perfect opportunity. I’d just received the rather nice MOSFET power switches you can see above. They are rather nice because you can connect them directly to a 3.3 volt signal and they will switch a high power load (in this case 35 volts going to a telephone bell). So I soldered a pair to a prototyping board. They’re the funky blue things with the terminal blocks.

We’ll leave aside the quality of the soldering on the connector terminals at the front of the board. I was finding it hard to make any kind of soldering work when I did those. I really did think I was losing my touch. But it turned out that it was because the solder bit had broken inside the soldering iron and the temperature had got set way too low.

The reason I got really annoyed was because the MOSFET board on the left hand side has been soldered into the wrong column. It should be one position to the left. This means that all the wires (several of which are underneath the board) are in the wrong place. Idiot. And especially idiot because I thought to myself “Careful not to solder this in the wrong place” as I actually soldered it into the wrong place.

Oh well, I’ve got spares.