I was at my local Hackspace on Wednesday night building a bat detector. While I've been interested in electronics for a while I've never tried soldering, or surface mounted soldering. I've never really played with individual capacitors, resistors, LEDs in a meaningful way either.
We used a Pistrelle Bat detector electronics project[1] which includes a Raspberry Pi Pico.
For sure I was the slowest in assembling pretty much every bit of it, struggled to see what I was doing, but it was fun.
The moment of truth was heating the board for the surface mounts to do their thing... there was a little popping but someone experienced was on hand to quickly flip any components back over that popped off in the heat.
I was very pleased with the outcome, the detector passed all its tests afterwards and now has its battery pack temporarily soldered on.
I took it out to the garden last night but sadly no luck bat hunting yet. Now I come to think of it I can't remember the last time I saw dark flitting shapes in the garden in the evenings... I hope they are still around.
[1]: https://www.omenie.com/pipistrelle.html
