Essential Skills

In this section, we’ll look at some important practical skills for working with circuits and electronics. Soldering lets you permanently connect electronic components, wires and breadboards together to form stable circuits. This is really useful when

  1. when you order a component and the headers aren’t attached yet,
  2. when you want to build more complicated circuits,
  3. when you want to extend the reach of a component i.e. adding a length of wire to the terminals on a sensor so you can move it further away and
  4. when you want to put your circuits in a housing or small enclosure.

We’ll also look at a handy tool for sanity checking your code. Serial communications can be used when you’ve got your Particle board plugged into your computer with the USB cable. It gives us a useful way to peek inside the code and it’s operation by allowing us to ‘print out’ messages to the serial monitor.

Components you will need

None.

Step By Step

Follow this primer:

  1. Guide and Tutorial: Starting Soldering

  2. Guide and Tutorial: Debugging with Serial

Practice

  1. Practice Exercise: DIY A Sensor

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