Pomodoro Prototype Soldered

After the last failures of trying to bridige connections using a tinned wire, I spent some time browsing tutorials on soldering and point-to-point connections online. Most were not that useful, but I ended up finding one handy tutorial that showed a decent way to do wiring on the copper layer (sadly, it was hard to find and I didn’t save it, so I can’t retrace it right now). So, I went back to my perfboard and tried to solder again, resulting in the wiring you see below.

So, it’s not the cleanest of jobs, but it gets it done. Because I didn’t have any more connector pins of the right size, I couldn’t solder another ISP interface on the board; hence, there’s that odd gap in the components there. Secondly, you can notice a burn or two on the wires on the underside – I had to change soldering around a time or two, and wasn’t paying too close attention to my iron placement, resulting in a little melt right there. Lastly, in the topside picture, you may notice that the three small pomdoro lights aren’t lit up – tomorrow, I’ll have to track down the issue with my multimeter.

A last thing I noticed when testing it out is that there’s an odd bug: there’s a minute gap between every state change. So, once it runs through 25 minutes in one pomodoro, it waits a minute before it initiates the 5 minute pause. I’m sure that’s just a little bug in the software. Of course, when I was testing it, I tweaker the timer to count in seconds rather than minutes, to see all the state changes. Clearly, that also obscured the state-change bug, as it seemed a natural delay. However, now that it’s a minute long, it’s far more noticeable an error.

I’m quite pleased. Even though the soldering is sloppy, I learned so much doing it that I’m pretty sure I can do a much better job next time. Furthermore, it was quite relaxing to do all the soldering. And, lastly, I learned so much doing this, that I’m looking forward to my next project. I’m not too sure what it’ll be, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something soon enough.