Building the Gertboard

I got my hands on a Gertboard the other day, and decided I would document the creation of it.

The first thing I saw when I opened the bags of kit were the SMD components - which scared me somewhat - having done a lot of soldering before but never with surface mount.  Still, the assembly manual included some good advice, and I wasn't too nervous about soldering them.

Look! No Hands!

I went through the parts list, and realised that none of the SMD resistors or capacitors had their values on them, so had to look up all of the part codes on the Farnell website.  Not a big deal, but a bit of a pain, and beginners may get confused by having to do this...

Then I set off.  The advice on soldering SMD in the manual is very well written, and I had no issues when I followed it pretty much to the letter, despite not having decent tweezers, and having to find a couple of errant resistors which had pinged across the desk on a few occasions!

Firstly, a couple of tips.  As you can see in the picture to the right, I tightened an elastic band around my pliers to hold them together - this makes holding things in them a hands free operation, and make life a lot easier!  I also pre-soldered one of the two pads for all of the SMD devices, which meant I could easily identify them and could spend more time concentrating on the fiddly bits.

Using the IDC connector to keep pins aligned

Secondly, the tip in the assembly manual which recommends using a sponge to keep the components flush with the board is a really good idea for the components, but it doesn't help keep the headers aligned.  I did this by using the ribbon cable IDC connector - also pictured, to ensure that the headers had the right spacing.  I could even use it for the long headers by using it at 90 degrees to the normal direction - between the joins between the sections of header.

All in all, the assembly went pretty smoothly, and (as I didn't have my multimeter to hand) I decided to risk it and went ahead and powered the board up straight away - without testing voltages, etc - I wouldn't recommend this, but I got lucky and it worked first time - I only checked with the button demo, I'll be playing with it more over the next few weeks / months.

The completed board, wired for the button test

The button test running on the pi (sorry for the quality of this one!)

Finally, if you've held on for this long, here's a 1 minute rendition of me building the thing in stop motion...