Finishing soldering and more drilling.

After receiving all the components, I finished soldering the main board.

Drilling the perfboard with the step drill bit proved to be more challenging than I expected, and ended up having misaligned holes. A couple of days after, I got the Fostner bit and drilled the holes easily.

Now I'm currently gluing  the dummy components to the perfboard. I need to get some blue resistors, capacitors in the correct form factor, and wooden spacers to glue the perfboard to the IN-14 board and finally put everything together.

Of Nixies and perfboards.

Today I received the 12 Nixie tubes I ordered.

Buying Soviet electronics is not complete without Cyrillic in the packaging.

The tubes arrived in a good state, but have short leads and I had to remove solder from most of them.

I tried using a laser engraver to cut out the holes from the perfboard, but it didn't do much more than just burn the shapes a little bit.

I ordered a a step drill bit and a fortsner bit, as suggested by a friend, to drill the holes. After I finish the perfboard, I can put the dummy parts on it, glue it to the IN-14 board, and finally solder the Nixies.

Soldering the IN-14 board.

The flux pen worked marvels to remove the solder bridges from the SMDs and to solder them properly.

 I also soldered all the pin headers and current-limiting resistors on the board.

Now I only need a few components to finish the main board, the Nixie tubes, and to do the perfboard with the dummy components and I can test if it works.

Continuing soldering the main board.

I fixed J1 being soldered on the wrong side of the board and soldered the HVPS that arrived today. It turns out that they no longer include the 330µF capacitor with it, so I'll need to get one.

Soldering

Soldering SMDs is horrible.

I tried to fix the solder bridges to no avail. I'll fix it when I get a flux pen. I then proceeded to solder the components I have to the main board.

Note that the pin sockets (J1) are soldered the other way around.

Printed Circuit Boards have arrived.

The PCBs arrived today. After I get the components, I can start soldering.

Steins;Gate Divergence Meter

This blog will document my progress building a divergence meter based on Tom Titor's design.