Snowflake Challenge #8: Personal Wins

Challenge #8

In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, a gift of your time to the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well.

So in early 2021 I repaired my first piece of broken electronics. Electronics has been a semi-serious interest of mine on and off since 2013ish but I mostly just read a load of books and never really attempted to do anything practical (outside of a few very minor things.) As I'm sure was the case for many people, lockdown provided me with an opportunity to revisit some of my old hobbies, so electronics got a second chance at life. In 2020 I bought myself a bench power supply (Lavolta BPS305), digital oscilloscope (Rigol DS1052E) and hot air re-work station (Newacalox 858D) and set about scaring my partner by threatening to fix things.

After a ton of procrastination I finally got round to fixing something. The patient in question was my Fender Frontman 25R (25W) which was buzzing and had a loose input jack. I was pretty confident that both issues were caused by a dry solder joint which turned out to be the case. Since it's a solid-state amp I spent way more time taking the thing apart than actually diagnosing and fixing the problem (all the pots had to come off the front and I ended up disconnecting all the power supply cables to make working with the board a bit easier.) Identifying and reflowing the bad joint only took a few minutes. I also found the service manual online which gave me the opportunity to do a bit of reverse engineering. All in all a useful learning experience and much easier than I expected.

Since then I've built this (I had to order a second one because the original fell victim to my terrible soldering skills - the second attempt was significantly better) and now I can stop using my phone as a signal generator which is nice. I still really need to get a proper soldering iron (thinking Hakko or Weller) because I'm currently making life needlessly difficult with my cheap soldering gun from Maplin. I could also do with a better workspace - right now I'm doing all my soldering on an offcut of wood in the one corner of the kitchen that hasn't been buried under my cooking equipment. My next project is to use the signal generator to test out some BJT transistor biasing configurations (common emitter, emitter follower etc.) after which I'll probably venture into the exciting world of op amps.