Holiday ramp-up on the V-One

[scottcun]

Since no one else has posted here in a while, I thought I’d share my n00b experiences with the V-One over the holiday weekend.

I received my V-One from Voltera a little over a month ago, and spent the last couple weeks experimenting with some simple circuits. The photo below contains a collection of both successful (and unsuccessful versions) of experiments to try out the capabilities of the V-One.

[jazozaya]

Hi @scottcun,

Wow! That’s a lot of boards.

I noticed a couple of components are missing. In case you have not seen it, I recommend you take a look at our video on solder paste and hand soldering, to get more robust connections. (Tip - Use a lot of flux when hand soldering).

All of our support videos are here, they contain a wealth of knowledge.

When working with large components like battery connectors, we recommend using through hole versions since they’ll handle mechanical forces much better

Do you know what ink and solder paste you have been using? Any feedback or questions for us so far?

[scottcun]

Hey @jazozaya ,

Good observation! Yes, I discovered some ‘mechanical’ challenges as part of my holiday ramp-up with the V-One, as part of the learning process

In the upper-left most board, you’ll notice that the battery holder is missing – I broke it off trying to mount a CR2032 battery. It was my first using the SMD battery holder, which the footprint calls for an adhesive rectangle. You can see the same battery holder in the board just to its right, and one with a battery in the holder below that one. I discovered that ‘Hot glue’ you use with a glue gun melts nicely at the pre-soak temperature during reflow. So both of these boards have a little piece of glue I had cut, placed, then pushed down on during the pre-soak. They appear to hold better with the glue.

I also broke off the ISP (SMD) 3x2 header on the board without the battery installed, and used hot-glue on the one with the battery (after reflow).

While I concur that through-hole would be much stronger, these were FR4 boards that I was experimenting with only SMT components. These were good exercises in thinking how to layout with just the one side and get more practice with single-sided before moving on to doing double-sided workflow.

The one thing I have not yet been able to master is repair/rework on these boards. The Arduino Uno template in the middle row second from the right is missing a 74HC393 (dual 4-bit binary counter) because it dislodged and broke traces while I was trying to remove a solder blob bridging two of the pins. I must have had the airflow and/or temp too high on my hot air iron – and I need to upgrade my soldering iron which only has an analog temp setting which is been hard to pin to a temperature hot enough to melt the solder but not too hot that it melts away the conductive traces, which I assume would be between 190C (peak reflow temp) and 210C (bake temp) for the materials I am using (see below).

For all of these boards, I was using Muscular Mermaid (Conductor 2) and Tough Toucan (Solder Paste). If you have any tips for successful rework/repair, I’d love to hear about them. Might be better to have them in a Getting Started / FAQ post.

I have watched all of the support videos, and spent a bit of time in the different community post topics while you folks were out on holiday – great stuff!