Soldering mistakes are by far the most common thing to go wrong in do-it-yourself electronics. It seems like I spend most of my tech-support time gently urging customers with failed kit builds to re-check their soldering, and when I have problems in my own builds, those also usually turn out to be soldering-related. Everybody, myself included, tends to think of failed components as a likely cause of problems, and we spend a lot of time doing differential diagnosis to figure out which components might have failed; but then once the problem is narrowed down to a single component, the actual issue usually turns out to be a bad solder joint on that component, not the component itself. The real point of the debugging is often just to figure out which solder joints to look at more closely. READ MORE

This posting gathers together a bunch of small news items:  new features on the Web site, notably including homegrown videos, the current state of the business, and some ideas I'm working on for future modules. READ MORE

The article from 2018 that originally appeared at this address has been removed because it's no longer correct; it was describing an earlier RSS URL that as of now (November 2021) still works, but has been changed again. The new new RSS URL, which you should use for new installations, is: READ MORE