Soldering, what could go wrong?

I’m good at software engineering, but in electronics, I’m a newbie. Nonetheless, I find electronics fascinating.

Last year I did the first basic tutorials with Arduino, then I played a little bit with Raspberry Pi and CI20 (technically not really electronics). And this year, I built a very simple circuit to connect the RGBI output of my Commodore 128 to VGA… I have been using breadboard, so no soldering, no PCB, or anything like that.

But yesterday I decided that I wanted to keep learning Arduino, so I tried to do some advanced tutorials, and it required soldering. I had never soldered before, I hadn’t read any soldering tutorial… but what could go wrong? Soldering is easy, right?

Well, everything went wrong… I tried to solder an LCD display but didn’t work, I tried to unsolder it and solder it again, but failed again. In fact, I think I burnt the LCD display. And also I think I broke the tip of the solder.

But on the positive side, I think I did all the possible mistakes that one possible can do when soldering… than means that I learned a lot :)

Anyway, I’ll keep learning electronics… I’ll keep learning how to solder, but this time I’ll practice with empty PCBs.