Towards Computation

Getting Ready to Solder

First, we want to do a bit of reading and video watching regarding soldering.

This first video is AWESOME. It has a lot of explanation for the process of soldering, including the chemistry behind what you’re doing.

Also, this comic does a good job of capturing much of the material. (Comics are, for visual/process-oriented activities, actually a very powerful way of communicating ideas. I choose them sometimes because of their highly visual nature. Also, anyone can bang out some text and sound intelligent… but, doing something as structured as a comic, and doing it well, takes a whole different level of planning and design for it to be effective. In short, I find a good comic to be harder to assemble than any number of words strung together.)

Soldering Is Easy (PDF, in Moodle)

I’ll ask you a few questions at the start of class about soldering. If you can’t answer 80% of the questions correctly, I’m not turning you loose with a soldering iron. Mind you, they won’t be hard… but, if you don’t at least take 6 minutes for the video, and another 15 minutes-ish for the reading… then I don’t want you using a tool that heats up to 700˚F.

Learning About the Arduino

Next, we’re going to be building an Arduino. (Well, a variant.) But… what is it?

Let’s learn about it from the guy who drives the project!

No quiz/test associated with this, but it does set the stage for the tiny computer that we’ll be building.