I felt like I was ruining everything around it

This is about the second board I have ever built by hand, and by about hour six it had stopped being about soldering…

I was testing my handywork with the multimeter, but some tests were failing. The boost converter was alive. I could measure it switching. It just was not putting anything out the other side, which as far as I understand it means the pins on one edge of the chip never actually stuck to the board. Same edge carries the feedback pin, so the chip could not see its own output either, and it was running flat out trying to fix a problem it could not measure.

My AI-helper suggested the fix was to flux that edge, put a bit of solder on a fine tip, and drag it slowly along the row of pads. They are half a millimetre apart and around it sit four or five parts I had already had to go back and rescue once that night.

I said no. Nothing was stopping me - I had the iron, I had the flux, I had spares of the chip. I just did not trust my hands at that point in the evening, and the thing about a board with forty-odd parts on it is that the expensive mistake is never the one you are aiming at. It is the capacitor three millimetres away that slides out of position while you are concentrating. At this point I was wondering if maybe SMD work is a lil too much for my arthritic hands.

By the end of it board two was retired with the chip out, and I melted one of the panel connectors by resting the iron on it while I was focused elsewhere…oops!

Glint Board #2 is the board that taught me some valuable lessons:

• Make sure there is enough solder on the pads before it goes on the hotplate.
• Hitting small components with the iron isn’t the end of the world.
• Don’t scrub the board with desoldering wick - that’s what really messed things up for me.
• It’s ok to keep trying, and it’s ok to say enough is enough for today.
• Like a From Software game - the real treasures are the skills you pick up along the way.