I have a perfboard, of the kind with all holes isolated from each other, like this one. I then have two of this male header strip inserted on the perfboar, parallel and spaced by one empy hole row. Now i have to solder the pins of one line with the one of the other, it making many 3-holes connection bridges (i hope i explained clearly).
What's the right/better way to do this? I tried making a bridge with the solder but ended up in a mess. I also tried using a little piece of solid wire for each two pins but it is ugly as hell..
i have made “bridges” with solder and didn’t end up in a mess. Maybe you should practice a bit with it and then you’ll be fine.
I did that by touching the areas i want to join with the soldering iron (2 holes at a time) and applying solder NOT directly on the iron, as you should never do, but on the areas (heat-transferring) around the holes.
If you manage to create a “path of heat” with your iron then the solder will stick to it, that’s the trick. :=)
i have a very old and almost rusty iron, i guess it is not helping at all (solder have an hard time melting with it). I think i’m buing a new one in these days.
How do you touch two holes at the same time? do you put the tip horizontal or something?
Soldering tips come in shapes and sizes. Maybe you do not need to replace the entire iron, just the tip.
The two main tip designs are "pencil" and "chisel". The chisel shape has a flat end, like a screwdriver. That makes it much easier to touch two pads at once. Furthermore: tin your tip, clean your tip, tin your tip again. Use soldering tin with rosin in it.
remember this: the point(?) remember this: the point(?) or tip (punta) of the soldering iron does not transfer heat so you have to use the sides of it.
I use solid wire , best way I’ve found is to get a long piece of wire(22gauge I think), bend the tip to the length that you want, then solder that on, the just snip the rest of the wire off at the joint with nail clippers. I don’t often use short wire briges though as they tend to get messy if you need to rework them. A good pair of tweezers helps as well…most electronics shops have them.
I’ve found that using the extra wire from components works great, use heat shrink though to cover the bare wire. Also doing a complete wire layout ah la my current blog. https://www.robotshop.com/letsmakerobots/node/2444
Ifinally purchased a new soldering iron and i must say that only now i understand how unsuitable my old one was. With this the solder melt like butter on an hot knife
here’s the result (please don’t be too harsh on your judication ):
it’s an analog to digital conversion chip, with 8 inputs and an i2c interface, and 12 bits of resolution. Handy if you run out of analong inputs on your board (like i did) and if you love all things i2c (like i do :P)
Here’s a “schematic” picture and another of the guy in action
