W17: soldering the tiniest of the tiny
All the electronic components are here! I used aerkiaga/fluidics to 3D-print three boards out of ABS. Unfortunately, my printer can't add copper vias, so it's basically a matter of putting components in place, then soldering them on the other side, connecting them with tiny wires. Gross, but it works. So far I've made:
- A small 9V barrel jack connector breakout board.
- A 9V to 28V boost converter, to power the sensor.
- An ESP32 board. Honestly I'm still soldering it, and there's a catch...
... one of the components is in a tiny QFN form factor chip that I still don't feel confident enough to put my soldering iron on. I soldered something that small before, but ended up overheating it (plus I bent or ripped a few pins and then dipped the whole thing in a non-electronics-safe cleaning bath... yeah...).
I've sent a couple more PRs to Avogadro 2:
- #878: rewrites and finishes the subgraph detection code.
- #887: fixes a few unimportant Valgrind errors so this kind of testing can be automated in the future.
I'm also learning to make biomolecular simulations using GROMACS. No new use-cases of that knowledge for now, but I hope to do something about this in the near future ;)