For heat transfer keep your solder tip wet with smear of solder
If you have trouble melting the solder onto the tip before you start then your iron is not hot enough. At the start I always test the tip with solder before proceeding. If it melts onto the tip and is hard to melt on the joint then the joint is not getting the heat it requires.
Make sure your tip is wet. Melt some solder onto it and this helps transfer the heat. Of course don’t have that much solder on your tip that you drop blobs on your board. Best is if you have a wire ball to wipe the excess off the tip. Second best is a wet sponge although some say this is not good for the tip.
While I’ve seen tutorials on soldering suggest placing the solder on the joint and put the tip on top of that I much prefer to attack it in the opposite direction. Put the wetted tip to the joint and then feed solder on top. If there is enough heat in the joint the solder runs to where it is needed.
Along with what Frits said. Have you got a chisel tip on your soldering iron? A chisel tip looks a bit like a chisel edge or screwdriver flat tip blade. And is why he suggested to make sure the broad flat surface makes contact with as much of the joint as possible. Pointy tips are not very useful. At first you might think the finer tip is helpful in pinpointing the heat and not burning anything else but chisel tips are available in small enough sizes and give better control of the solder flow.
Okay, so I got one wheel to finally turn! But the other wheel doesn’t budge. When I use my hands to turn the wheels, one motor is smooth and turns pretty good and that’s the one that works, but the other motor takes a little more strength to turn around which is maybe why it doesn’t turn. Am I right?
Here are the connections to the motors. I feel that the connects are pretty good, is something wrong?
I accidentally melted a little bit of the black jumper cable. Does this affect the connection from the board to the motor? Because after it melted, the motor stopped working :(.
It looks like the melted part of the black wire may be making contact with the solder terminal of the red wire of the other motor. If this is the case, it will short out and cause problems.
Replace the wire or at least wrap some electrical tape around the melted insulation to avoid a short circuit.
im finding it impossible to upload any pictures… :(
I followed ur instructions completely. Except i couldnt find an antenna wire, so i used some extra wire to short the battery box. Some of the plastic melted onto the terminal. Could that be the problem ??
So i tried writing a random program for the PICAXE chip.
The SAME thing happens (i.e. the servo turns just a bit then centres itself again)
So i tried reconnecting the servo wire to the board. It was correct the first time though.
But i discovered something. Every time i connected the servo cable to the 3 pins. The SAME thing happened. it turns a bit then centres itself . This happened even when there was no program stored in the chips memory…
Can you post a picture of the board showing all the chips? I want to be sure you have all the chips inserted in the right spots, and turned in the correct orientation.
It’s hard to see but it looks like you have the resistor chip in the bottom socket and the motor driver in the top socket. If so, they need to be switched.
Can you post a picture showing the connections of the Sharp sensor to the board? Include a picture showing all of your analog pins (did you use the shorting blocks like the instructions said?). Be sure the pictures are clear, well lit and in focus.
