First Encounter

>> For my birthday, I received a Bluetooth speaker kit.

• what she did
• how she did it
• what went wrong
• what to do next time

My dad, also an electrical engineer, thought that this would be perfect for me to practice assembling parts; and he also thought having my own speaker is a plus as well. I mean, he’s not wrong; and for 20 bucks on AliExpress, it’s a pretty good deal.
I love DIY projects, but this was a beast.

The kit came with a circuit board and its circuit parts, two speakers, a Bluetooth receiver, a switch, jumper wires, and plastic casing for the outer shell. The kit itself didn’t require designing (thank god) and only needed the parts to be soldered together, then assembled via screws and casing.

The first task of the day: placing and identifying parts on the circuit board. “Not too bad” was my first thought.

This took me 3 hours.

I’m.. being very vulnerable here..

Yvonne???? How did this happen????

WELL.

NUMBER 1:

I kept checking the polarity of the BJTs, capacitors, the IC, and the microphone, knowing well it might explode if I had it on wrong. (I’m reminiscing the smell in my circuit lab..)

NUMBER 2:

I was also furiously checking the resistor color bands. This is because I once put a 100K Ohm resistor thinking it was a 10 Ohm resistor.. never again.

NUMBER 3:

And the LEDs; there were SO MANY OF THEM so I was putting them on manually while also checking polarity of those, but I ended having to redo it 3 times. Because the PCB board is nested at the bottom of the speaker, the LED lights needed to be bent a certain way to be seen..

this image might explain this better than me lmao

NUMBER 4:

The wire trimming. I wasn’t going to get to soldering today (I’d already accepted that fact (´。＿。｀) ), so I needed to prep the wires by shortening them.
I learned today that airborne wires are particularly drawn to my unprotected, unscathed face. It was, respectfully, a warzone.

Needless to say, I was very humbled.

TLDR; what did I learn?