Drawdio Workshop

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osbock
 
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Joined: Tue Jan 23, 2007 1:12 pm

Drawdio Workshop

Post by osbock »

Hi gang,
I just led a soldering workshop at the Duxbury Free library using Adafruit's Drawdio kit. It's challenging, but much more appealing than a simple LED badge. It was a tremendous success, we had 12 kids (9 boys and 3 girls) and in about 2 hours they had all assembled their drawdios, most of them working.

A couple of reflections/lessons learned:
1. It was barely enough time, and not quite enough to troubleshoot all the boards. I had the assistance of my son and his girlfriend, and I'm working on training them in troubleshooting for the future. For a smaller group, it would have been enough time.
2. Extra copper tape would have been handy to have on hand (I'm ordering some for my next workshop)
3. I should have set the expectation at the beginning that they may not go home with a working device but they would learn something. Since I didn't I volunteered to fix them, and that was useful anyway to see what were the common failures. I took 4 home, 2 had bad solders (just touched them up with the help of liquid flux) 1 had a bad chip, and one had ripped off the pads for the speaker. I had two spare kits so I was able to get everyone back in business, and let them know what was wrong. I'm contemplating getting sockets for the next class, even though it raises the profile somewhat.

I wrote up a troubleshooting guide:
http://baldwisdom.com/projects/drawdio-workshop/
Feel free to link, or just copy verbatum if you find it useful.

Thanks for the great kit Adafruit!

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Joined: Thu Feb 11, 2010 2:51 pm

Re: Drawdio Workshop

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

First and foremost: teaching kids to solder and make stuff is awesome! If you don't have Soldering and Drawdio Skill Badges yet

- http://www.adafruit.com/products/465
- http://www.adafruit.com/products/568)

.. you do now. If you do have them, I've just bought you another of each. ;-)

Send a note to [email protected] with a link to this thread and we'll get them to you.

Second, a suggestion: next time, try a test-as-you-go approach. For each component soldered into the board, have a simple test to make sure it's doing what it should.. check conductivity between the leads of the components and the next lead/open pad on the same trace, have a battery-and-resistor that can force current through an LED to make sure it lights up properly, etc. It's easy to fix assembly errors if you catch them one at a time and can assume that everything else on the board works as it should. The nightmare of debugging comes when you have to identify an unknown number of faults in a fully-assembled board.

Arranging a build for progressive testing makes you understand the circuit on a signal-by-signal basis. It will also give kids practice taking basic measurements and thinking of electronics as a form of applied science.

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