Category Archives: smd soldering challenge

Competitive Soldering Gets Heated at Hackaday Superconference

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The Hackaday Superconference is in full swing, and in addition to the greatest hardware hackers, a great gathering of tinkerers, awesome talks, badge hacking, and so much more, we’ve also got competitive soldering. This year, we’re making soldering competitive with the SMD Solder Challenge. It began Friday morning as hackers go heat to head, hand soldering frustratingly tiny parts.

The rules are simple: you’re given a light, a magnifying glass, some solder, wick, flux, and the standard Hakko soldering iron (with the standard tip). The task is to solder up our own special version of the SMD Challenge Kit from …read more

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Competitive Surface Mount Soldering Comes to Supercon

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Who will show the best soldering skills at the Hackaday Superconference next week? We have a little — in fact, a very little — challenge for you: solder surface mount components down to a tiny 0201 package. This is the SMD Soldering Challenge and successfully finishing the board at all shows off the best of hand soldering skills, but during the weekend we’ll also keep a running leader board.

For the event we’re using the SMD Challenge board by MakersBox which utilizes a SOIC8 ATtiny85 to drive LED/resistor pairs in 1206, 0805, 0603, 0402, and 0201 packages. There will be …read more

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Breakfast at DEF CON — The Greatest Illicit Meetup of All

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Every year we host Breakfast at DEF CON on the Sunday morning of the largest hacker conference in the United States. I think it’s a brilliant time to have a meetup — almost nobody is out partying on Sunday morning, and coffee and donuts is a perfect way to get your system running again after too much excess from Saturday evening.

This year marks our fourth Breakfast and we thought this time it would be completely legit. Before we’ve just picked a random coffee shop and showed up unannounced. But this year we synced up with some of our friends …read more

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