My Robot Car Kit

I finally got my robot car kit today. :-)

This is what I will be doing in my Fundamentals of Circuits Lab for the rest of this semester. It will be a very interesting project because there are a lot of components that need to be soldered to different circuit boards. I created another blinking light chip today so hopefully this one will work better than my first one. The solder points are much smaller and clean than my first blinking light chip. I am starting to develop tricks for soldering components.

I learned today that it is best to start with the components that are the least susceptible to heat. It makes sense, If you save the heat sensitive components for last you won't have to worry about constantly heating up the components every time the solder iron touches the copper on the chip board.

With all the fun stuff mentioned above, it should be no surprise to hear that today was a very busy day for me. I had two lab reports due today, a rough draft for an essay, an essay outline, a section of problems for Digital Circuits, a section of problems for Fundamentals of Circuits, and a section of Technical Math problems.

The trick is to keep on top of everything. They really pile the work on you in college so if you slip just once it will start to build up very very quickly and it won't be long at all before you have more work than you have time for. This hasn't happened to me but I know that it is very easy for work to pile up judging by how much homework I get every night.

P.S There are a lot more parts in the robot car kit then you can see in this picture. They are all piled on top of each other and there are a lot of tiny components. :-)