Dear (Dis)Assembler
Exercise | (Dis)Assembling |
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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
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1 | General | 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.
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: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
2 | Kit | 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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
3 | Kit | 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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
4 | Kit | 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:
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Circuits | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
5 | Workshop | Sizzling Semiconductors by Ivona Vreme Moser, Nø School Nevers: 06/08/22 - After traveling back home with this instrument, some of the components fell off from the circuit board and needed to be soldered back on. I attempted to fix this at home, where the setup of my “workbench” was on the floor in my apartment, with a soldering iron plugged to the power strip next to me. Through this attempt of repair, I discovered unexpected ways to interact with the instrument through the use of a soldering iron:
Once the component was soldered back on, the instrument somehow didn’t sound the same. I didn’t understand why, but the fact that it was half-working made it produce sounds I never heard when it was functioning normally. When the heated iron made contact with one of the pads where the leg of a component was connected to, the instrument started producing an oscillating sound. It was as if the iron acted like a switch. Feeling accomplished and empowered from my first attempt of repair, I turned off the power strip, only to find out that the instrument was no longer working. This was bizarre considering the instrument operates on a battery. Was it the soldering iron and the power strip that were “playing” the instrument all this time? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
6 | Workshop | Centre for Networked Intimacy by Dasha Ilina, iMAL - The Cookery: 24/01/23 - In this workshop, we built circuits that were meant to record sounds, but the one that I built ended up producing sounds. While it was unfortunate, I also saw it as a fortunate event because it produced a particular sound that I wouldn’t know how to replicate. Even though it wasn’t working as it was intended to, it’s an organic result of and a reflection of the making process/the sound of a potential short circuit. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
7 | Takeaways |
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