It’s nearly 1 month to this date when my daughter and I attended the RC2014 meet up in TNMOC in Bletchley. But it’s only today we chose to assemble the soldering kit and work table to do the start soldering. I had been reminiscing about this in my previous blog post, as a teen, on how I used to etch circuits on copper circuit boards and build a door bell.

This time we are assembling the 8 bit RC2014 computer. But before that I wanted to check if my eyesight can handle soldering. So we decided to practice soldering by assembling a cheap £5 kit - the TTL Logic Probe.

And yes, we did it. Was my daughter’s first ever solder and mine after 30 years. The soldering of the IC looked hard, so gave that piece to my daughter. We did not have 5v battery holder with 2-pin JST, instead we used the 3v battery holder that we got with microbit kit. It worked, and the happiness of having to see something glow after spending nearly 3 hours, is a great one.

Learning by doing is a hard habit to get into. In my previous company we had some really good engineers who we totally into building 3D models, assembling split keyboards. Was fascinating to see them get time to do that back then, but I do realise now that time is available in plenty - we just have to spend it on doing what we love.