Soldering the jumpers - front or back

raeedcho / temper

a wireless-only split keyboard based on the chocofi

CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 - Permissive

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Soldering the jumpers - front or back #13

Closed paradoxicator closed 5 months ago

paradoxicator commented 5 months ago

Hello - thank you for your excellent work! I just wanted to clarify the jumpers - I wasn't understanding if the jumpers needed to be soldered on the front or back of the PCB..

I have completed the whole build, but I soldered it on the back (instead of the battery/front side). After looking at some pictures of prior questions/issue posts, I noticed that there was a picture of the jumpers soldered on the front side.

Please forgive this newbie if this is a stupid question. I have never built one with jumpers like this before.

raeedcho commented 5 months ago

Hi! The jumpers need to be soldered on the front side, under the battery. In hindsight, I probably should have designed it the other way, but that's how it is.

If you've already soldered the jumpers but haven't done the rest, there are a few easy fixes that I think might work:

First, if nothing else is done, then just flip the PCBs around--they're mirror images, so there's no problem
If you haven't socketed the microcontroller yet, I believe you can socket that "upside-down", if you're okay with that. The downside is that if you then move to another keyboard and use the same microcontroller, you might have to be aware of how to connect things.
If things are all soldered, you might have no choice but to desolder some things. If you've never desoldered anything before, I suggest getting some braided solder wick and watching some YouTube videos on desoldering.

Good luck!

KastenTaco commented 5 months ago

Please make clarify the build instructions accordingly. I've burnt through a Nice!Nano because of this...

paradoxicator commented 5 months ago

I actually completed everything before I realized this.. I soldered it on the correct side and desoldered the back with a solder wick. Thank you for the clarification! It's a great board!

AngryTacoEater commented 5 months ago

It's great indeed! Didn't mean to sound snarky. Just frustrating when this happens. Would be a shame if others have this happen. The Nice!Nano is pricy to burn up.

raeedcho commented 5 months ago

Sorry you burnt out a microcontroller!

The instructions are actually in the readme already--the first instruction, as it happens:

Solder the jumpers underneath the microcontrollers

I could see how this could be easily missed, since it's not part of the "front" or "back" list of things to do. I wrote it this way though because it's the easiest thing to mess up, so it's best to do it first, in my opinion.

I'll try to clarify the readme a bit more though, as I suppose that language could be ambiguous. Thanks for pointing it out 🙂