Dear (Dis)Assembler

Exercise	(Dis)Assembling
Coach	Soldering Iron
Assistant Coach	DIY Soldering Kits/Circuits
Training objective	Build/take apart/fix/break your own tools
Do this (if you want to)	1. Put together or take apart an object 2. Find out what you want to do next as you go
Potential application in [graphic design]	Use “Inspect” or “View Page Source” as a way to learn how web design/development works in your own way/pace, or to understand why the dev team requests specific requirements for assets from you but doesn’t explain why.

DIYry

DIY soldering kits: My way into the world of DIY electronics was through DIY soldering kits. I knew that this way of learning through buying kits would be unsustainable in the long run, especially when I had already noticed the red flags but still struggled to find a solution.

So, what happens when you fall under this category of a consumer?

- You’re an adult beginner who relates to the accessible language of kits made for kids
- You’re curious about components and circuits that are considered to be more complex, and are limited by what the kit manufacturer decides is beginner-friendly enough
- You can’t relate to the projects that are expected to be built with the kits, but still go through it anyway because you enjoy and learn from the building process

Answer: you end up with projects that get piled up in a box that you don’t open again, because as much as you want to hack or circuit bend them, you don’t have the technical knowledge or resources to do so. Below are the takeaways from my attempts to learn about electronics through DIY soldering kits that trapped me in this loop that I found myself in, and am still finding it hard to exit it:

Junior Theremin by MadLab: The first and most exciting and promising moment in any building process starts with an LED that lights up. Except when the LED is the only thing that lights up and everything else is broken, and most of the time, they still remain broken because you can’t find out what’s wrong. In this case, it was a sound device that made no sound, but turned on an LED.

Makerbuino by Circuitmess: In the building process of this DIY game console, checkpoints were provided in the assembly guide to make sure that I was on the right track, which I failed to pass as my screen didn’t light up when it should. My initial solution was to contact the company for help, and as expected, was told to fix the soldering joints. Even so, it didn’t solve the problem, and I sought out further help from the school’s Interaction Station. The mystery continued until Danny van der Kleij helped me find out that the problem was actually with the drained battery all this time. The debugging process was a whole journey in itself, but one thing to remember: always use the multimeter.

I observed a common pattern in the kits that I worked on: they all have a sound component. I decided that it was time to learn through the more challenging teachers, where the finished product would be something I was actually interested in and could make use of, and I found them through DIY kits specific to electronic instruments: