Soldering tutorials, tips and tricks

Breadboards and hook-up wires are great for prototyping and testing out basic circuits. At some point though, you will want to create something more permanent and robust. Robots move around, bump into things, shake and vibrate and wires tend to disconnect way to easy. Soldering will help fix that! The best part is that even though it may look a bit intimidating, soldering is actually quite easy. All it takes is some practice and using the right tool for the job. Below is a collection of soldering videos and tutorials that helped me get from an absolute beginner to being relatively comfortable making custom boards with through-hole, and even SMD components (most of these even work!).

They videos in the playlist below start from the basics (like what is solder), go through choosing the right soldering irons and tips, making a basic connection and end with a walk-through of SMD soldering by hand.

Even when you take your time and plan out your project well, you will end up making a mistake, put the component in the wrong place, or with the wrong orientation. Some of those errors are relatively easy to fix, others take some more patience and trickery. At the end of the playlist, there is a great tip for de-soldering SMD components by hand, just using basic tools. This tip alone has that already saved two of my projects!

I am not the author of those videos, so if you find them useful, please like them and let the guys who created them know in the YouTube comments section!

To start here is a great intro to soldering tutorial write-up by SparkFun. Once you go through that, check out the video playlist below!

Soldering Tutorials Videos Playlist