All right, next up, next up is Ben Hibben.
His talk, Tips for Designing and Teaching Soldering Kits for Beginners.
Blenster, as we should know him, has been teaching soldering to beginners for over eight years,
not satisfied with the variety of existing kits he used at different events.
He came up with the hat to start creating kits designed to be easy for beginners to work with.
Together, they have been taught many hundreds of students at dozens of events over the years.
Please welcome Ben.
Thank you very much for having me.
This is a talk I've been wanting to give for a couple years now.
There's a lot of frustration.
I'm going to try to get through all of this in the time I have allotted,
hopefully without intentionally hurting anyone's feelings,
but there are a lot of kits out there that are designed by EE types who know how to solder
and think, oh, this will be cool, or this will be cheap,
and they throw something on a PCB and they send it to some people,
and then somebody like me has to teach a bunch of people ranging from age six to it's not polite to ask.
So having done that for a number of years,
I have some feedback and some things for people to consider when they are designing these,
because while I do sell these with my company Mr. Blinky Bling,
we don't want to be the only people doing this.
That's not our source of money.
So who am I and why should you care?
As he said, I've been teaching people to solder for over eight years every year at DerbyCon.
I've had many events for the Level 1 Hacker Space in Louisville, Kentucky,
which I am a member and volunteer at,
and I've gone to B-sides, I've gone to a bunch of security conferences,
I've been to libraries and other Maker Faires and other Maker events teaching everyone.
I think my youngest is a four-and-a-half boy and girl,
but that's honestly on the low end because hand-eye coordination and all that.
Anyway, I have literally hundreds of successful students,
including several people who have gone through soldering classes before and had a bad time,
so that's why I feel like I'm entitled to talk about this.
All right, so I apologize.
I don't normally like to have word-heavy slides,
but again, I'm trying to get all this in in as much in a half hour,
and this is like a two-hour rant that I can go on.
Ask Brad Loister's wandering around.
He's one of the former presidents of Level 1,
and he's not here because he's heard me rant about this before.
He went to the other track.
So when you're teaching new students,
there are a number of mistakes that they're going to make.
The most common ones involve too little or too much solder.
Too little solder is really easy to solve and work around.
Too much solder is harder to solve and work around,
and there are some design tricks you can use.
I will show a picture later on ways to get rid of bridges.
I found a nice bridge picture there for that.
Some parts are not really obvious in terms of orientation,
and it's not just things like LEDs or transistors, but things like batteries.
If you buy the wrong battery pack,
it will have like a little plastic notch that you're supposed to line up,
and I promise you, most of your students will not notice it,
or a good chunk of them won't notice it.
So if you buy something that can only go on the board in one direction,
that simplifies the assembly process.
They will remove the heat too soon or leave the heat on too long,
and the heat on too long is one of the things I think a lot of people
who are designing these kits don't think about,
especially when they use tiny traces and tiny pads,
because electrically, that's all you need.
But if you have a 12-year-old who's holding the iron directly on the PCB
for three minutes, they're going to burn that right off,
and then I'm going to tell them, I'm sorry, you have to start over.
So if you think about these common mistakes and the pitfalls that they can have,
you can incorporate them into your PCB design
in ways that are resilient against them,
and that's what I'm going to go through on this talk.
All right, so cheap kits, they're frequently very small
because PCBs are expensive and small PCBs are cheaper,
and a lot of these events are run by people who are more focused on the price
than whether or not it's a quality kit,
and I very much want to encourage people to fight that.
If you're teaching soldering or if you're going to be doing something like this
for an event and someone is pitching to you a $1.25 apiece kit,
you might want to explain to them one of the reasons,
why this is going to have a bad time day of event,
and basically a small PCB,
it's much easier for the student to burn themselves with it,
it's much easier to push around the table,
it's much harder to keep it stable.
If you're going to use something like the unhelpful hands,
which I have never used at any of my events,
but if you're planning on that, those tiny PCBs are terrible for it,
they're just miserable to work with,
and beginners already think that soldering is harder than it is,
it's one of those skills everyone thinks is difficult until they learn it,
and they're like, oh, this is easy and kind of relaxing, yeah, yeah.
So, yeah.
Bad silkscreen, if you get the cheapest PCBs possible,
sometimes the silkscreen is not on there very well
or the directions are backwards on one notable kit,
the positive and negative on the LED were backwards,
that was not fun.
Tiny pads are difficult for the students to line up on
and you can burn them off the PCB.
Tiny component holes, it may be the same size as the leg,
but again, getting that in can take some effort,
or you may have those cheaper LEDs
that have the little square part in the middle of the leg,
and you get down to that standoff and then the students bend or break it
because they're trying to push that through.
Slightly larger hole makes the part go through the PCB really easily
and doesn't leak too much solder if you don't go too large.
So it's just one of those things, if you make it easier to put the parts in,
it makes the whole process easier and the students enjoy the class better.
If you have awkward positioning of your parts,
you can't get the iron in there,
so something may look visually cool,
but then everything is close together,
it's hard to get the iron in there, and again, you're dealing with beginners.
So I don't have a problem assembling that,
but I can do 0201, not that I want to, but have done,
and I do 042 more often than I like.
This isn't for me, it's for someone who's never held a soldering iron before
or may have held it once or twice, so keep that in mind.
And then, of course, tiny traces I mentioned already and plastic components.
People want to put power switches on, it's very tempting.
I generally discourage it, we don't use them on our kits, if at all possible,
and the reason for that is, again, students are going to hold the soldering iron there
a long time and they're going to melt the inside of that part.
It's happened many times.
And then one of my biggest pet peeves is an unbalanced layout.
That cheap kit you see that's the size of my pinky frequently,
it usually has one LED, sometimes it's a flashing LED,
sometimes it's a regular LED, and it's in the middle of that tiny strip of PCB,
and when you put it on the table, because that's where it's going to be assembled,
on a table, the student's pushing it all around the table because it just flops around.
It's unbalanced.
So these are some of the things that make beginning soldering kits miserable to deal with,
even if you know what you're doing, and if you don't know what you're doing,
it's 10 times harder.
So what can we do to solve these problems?
Okay, I'm doing all right. I'll try not to rush too much.
I'm trying to get, as I said, a couple hours of ranting done pretty quickly.
So tiny PCBs, they're cheap and they're easy to package and carry,
and that is the only thing I can think that benefits.
The entire board heats up. You can burn your fingers if you're holding it like this
and you're soldering like that. You can burn your fingertips very easily,
especially if you hold the iron on there a long time.
They're honestly harder to use than you might think,
especially if you don't know what you're doing.
They get lost easily.
You have to put your parts closer together because there's not much real estate,
and then bridging becomes a problem, or assembly becomes a problem
because your parts are too close together.
And they're just, honestly, they're not as cool as some of the bigger projects.
PCBs are not that expensive, and something a little bit larger
that they can see, that they can show to people,
it won't get lost in the bottom of a drawer, you know, it's cooler.
So one of the solutions that we have done with our kits
is we recognize that people learn in different ways.
So if you look at the silkscreen for the LED,
there are four different ways to figure out the orientation.
We've got the positive and negative for the adults and teenagers
if we're giving a class on E or, you know, electrical stuff
and like what a diode is and how it behaves
as a kind of turnstile for electricity
and how we're using the fact that it emits light when it does that to build the kit.
You can talk about all that if you're in the right age group,
but if you're not in that age group, if you're doing an elementary school,
then maybe you want a long and a short line
because you have a long and a short leg.
If you buy quality LEDs, you're going to have positive on long and negative on short.
That's not always true, so test your components when you're ordering them.
Make sure, you know, again, get some quality LEDs.
And then we also have a round and a square pad,
so that helps visual students.
So you can say put the short leg, I think, in the square hole.
That helps as well.
Then there's the flat spot, and that is primarily for the instructor
because you can line that flat spot up with the flat side of the LED
while you're checking to make sure that it's incorrect
before you let them solder it in,
so you don't have to try to remove it and put it back in
when they solder it in backwards because they will.
And then, you know, try to remember that the people we're teaching
don't have any of the insider industrial knowledge.
They don't know the terms.
They don't know a lot of the stuff that you may implicitly take for granted,
so try to think about the best way to explain things
and keep in mind that, you know, they really, you know,
this is a very beginning-level process.
They're not anywhere near an EE.
They're just taking their baby steps.
So as I mentioned earlier, the tiny pads, tiny holes,
you can burn the tiny pads off the PCB real easily,
and then the PCB's ruined.
There's usually no way to fix that.
It's harder to get the soldering iron in place.
If you know what you're doing and you know exactly how you need to apply the heat
and the solder, then a small pad's fine,
but if you don't know what you're doing
and it's your first time holding this thing
and it's a little bit awkward in your hand and you're not comfortable,
then using a little more space to be able to put the iron there
on the pad next to the part is a big part of making it smoother
and easier for the students.
It also allows them to see the solder flow.
So when they see how it moves, there's usually this aha moment,
and then everything's easier for them.
As you can see, we use long pads on the back of our kits.
The pads discourage bridging, and they solve that earlier problem
I mentioned where they put too much solder on.
So they pull solder away from the center, and it is like magic.
They also give the student plenty of opportunity to see how the solder moves
and to get the iron in at whatever angle they feel comfortable.
Once they see how it works and do it a couple of times,
doing the smaller pads is no problem.
So one of the things that I like to encourage you to think about
is the thermal load rather than the electrical load,
and I think this is in a later slide as well.
But you want to think about what can be damaged by heat.
Your students are going to leave the iron on too long.
It's just they're going to be slow and cautious as they figure this out,
and that's natural and it's normal and it's okay,
and we need to encourage that.
One of the ways we can encourage that is by making sure that they have access to
– by making sure that none of the parts that are on there
are going to be cooked by the heat.
I mentioned extra obvious alignment hints.
Again, you and I, we know how to read these schematics and silt screens,
but they're coming to this brand new.
So the more obvious you can make it and how things go, the better.
Anything that's keyed for one-way assembly, like I mentioned before,
that helps tremendously.
And you want to avoid using the same footprint for multiple parts if you can.
So if you have six different resistors on there,
that's going to slow down the class because now you have to make sure
that everyone's putting the correct resistor in the correct place.
And remember, they don't know about the bands.
They're not going to understand the difference or the effect
that this is going to have on the circuit.
So if you can skip that and avoid having that problem in the first place,
please do so.
It'll make my job a lot easier when I'm teaching them.
And then, yeah, a low, unique part count reduces the overall class effort.
So six LEDs of the same color, great idea.
Six resistors of the same value, that's good.
It's repetitive, it helps them.
It's where you throw in the differences that it becomes a problem.
So there's that picture I mentioned of that big trace.
That trace is not electrically needed by any means
for an LED running off of a CR2032 battery.
It's just not.
However, the thermal load is absolutely why that's there.
I have never had a student burn that off a PCB,
no matter how long they've left the iron on there.
So try to think about that thermal load
more than you think about the electrical load,
because your students are going to heat stress the board
in ways that you wouldn't when you're building the example
or some of the students at the local university
or wherever you have tested.
They already kind of know what they're doing.
So you need to think, what is a seven-year-old going to do to this?
One of the solutions we use for unbalanced layouts,
we like to have at least three LEDs.
They're the first parts that go in.
They're the parts that have that anti-bridging pad on it.
We use regular pads on the other parts.
And they form table legs.
We have at least three on our smallest kit, three or four,
and then on our larger kits, eight or nine
or six around the outside.
These form little table legs.
They keep the PCB off the table.
They form an air gap.
The PCB is nice and level.
It doesn't roll around on the table.
You can heat it up as much as you want
without damaging the table underneath.
So you want to think about how you can design the kit
easier on you as well.
That's easier on you and easier on the facility
when you're teaching soldering.
You don't want this thing to be pushed around the table
or tipsy or anything,
because they're having a hard enough time
holding that iron in the first place.
Yeah, less is more for beginners.
You're going to think of some really cool things you could do,
save them for your advanced kits or your intermediary kits,
for your beginner kits.
A small number of parts is fine.
We intentionally aim for as broad an age and gender range as we can,
so we just go with bright-ass LEDs,
because everyone loves them.
You're like, who doesn't?
So think of it that way,
and then save the other ideas for your intermediary and advanced kits.
Oh, we use cups on the table for the legs.
So we have the students trim the leads.
We have them hold one side and trim with the cutters
so it doesn't go off into their eye or my beard.
You can come up with your own humorous way of getting them to do that.
But if you put a little cup on the table,
they'll put their spare parts in there,
and your table won't get near as messy as if you don't have that.
So that's one of those nice-to-haves
that I highly recommend for anyone who's teaching soldering.
Yes, and soldering is...
I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here,
but for anyone who's watching this on YouTube,
soldering is fun and easy, and I want you to know how to do it.
When I teach soldering, I start with the concept
that soldering is not like other forms of sticking things together.
It's not like tape or glue where a lot of pressure is your friend.
You want to explain to them that using a lot of pressure
with the soldering iron is counterproductive.
They're going to have a bad time.
You want to talk about heat and heat transfer
and how the heat's doing work.
A lot of people who know how to solder
put all the solder on the iron
and then try to put that on the wire or other part,
and then it doesn't work,
because the solder is very happy on that very hot iron
and has no interest in being in that cold wire.
You've got to heat that wire up,
make the solder work to go across it,
and get to that hot spot.
And if you can convey that knowledge to your students,
they're going to have a much better time when they're soldering.
You want to teach them to heat it up,
count to three, add the solder,
remove the solder,
and then count to one,
and then remove the heat.
When you get the hang of soldering,
you don't necessarily need to do that,
but for beginners, it's very important to go over that process
so that they get the heat where it needs to be,
and they get that nice shiny silver solder ball.
It's fantastic.
Oh, yeah, instruct these students
to hold the ends of the leads
so they don't go flying off.
That's important.
Humor is good.
I use a lot of humor in my spiels
when I'm doing this at various events,
but be aware that the failure mode to humor is often jerk,
so try to be cautious with how you do your humor
so you don't inadvertently offend your students
or make people feel like they're not welcome.
Yeah, and focus more on the soldering itself
than giving them a crash course in EE.
There's only so much the student's going to be able
to absorb in that lesson.
You only have them for 15, 20 minutes or so.
They don't need to know as much about, you know,
how a resistor works.
So, yeah, that's the short version of my rant.
If you want to hear more about this,
if you want more details,
if you want me to go through some tips and tricks
for teaching students,
I'm happy to do so.
I don't have alcohol,
but I did bring some good Iva chocolate
and some Rice Krispie treats,
so if you want either of those,
come get some from me.
I am super friendly and happy to talk to you all,
so just come up and say hi.