Pre Lab

If you don't have all your parts you will be doing Alt Lab 5. That is a combination of labs 4 + 5.

Surface Mounting

Before lab:

• Take index of your parts. If things are missing order them ASAP
• Read about the methods of surface mount soldering. This and this are good overviews of the ways we can get SMD components to stick to a board.

For those of you in NYC

• determine if you have access to the Makerlab. If you do not take whatever steps are necessary to get there (e.g. covid test, speaking to Makerlab director Niti Parikh, etc)
• I am hoping there is enough room in the Makerlab for us to be there socially distanced. We will primarily be talking about hot air re-work stations and reflow ovens. You should still read about the methods for DIY at home Surface Mount soldering. You will not have access to Cornell Tech and the Makerlab forever, learning techniques for doing this at home make for a more valuable skill than only being able to do it with specialized equipment.

For those of you not in NYC

• get your hands on Lead free low heat solder paste. There are tons of these with various attributes. Just make sure you can put a relatively fine tip on it. When it comes, refrigerate it. Tweezers are more or less a necessity, you can use what you have at home but precision tweezers make a difference and don't cost much. I like these. I also would highly recommend getting a flux pen, these are good for surface mount, but also regular soldering and desoldering.
• What method you eventually decide to go with will depend on your particular set up. In general the method described in the first reading with a hot plate or skillet. A stove will also work but either a.) USE A PAN YOU DON"T COOK WITH and/or b.) coat the bottom in tin foil. A layer of sand in the pan will distribute heat for more even heating.
• There is no reason you can't combine methods. Hand soldering a pin or two of the dense IC's will keep them from shifting around.

Burning a bootloader

• Be able to answer "What is a bootloader?" There will be a pop quiz.
• On the board you designed determine which pins map to MOSI, MISO, SCK, RST, VCC and GND.
• Take a look at how to burn an arduino with another arduino. Is there anything you will have to do differently
• Which boot loader is on the metro mini in your kit?
• The arduinoIDE stores board file in /Users/(username)/Library/Arduino15/packages, You can see where this is by looking at the bottom of the preferences menu.
• In /Users/(username)/Library/Arduino15/packages/adafruit/hardware/avr/(version #)/ what is the boards.txt file doing?