The process (taken with camera phone)

I picked up a small fun kit from Cornfield Electronics to solder at Protospace. I was able to solder it in under 2 hours.

Which is still pretty slow for such a small thing *sigh*. Photos were taken with camera phone.

Resistors and IC2 (infrared detector) were soldered in first

Next: capacitors, the on/off switch and the microcontroller

here you can see the RGB LED and the IR emitter soldered into place

And voilá! after putting in the battery and JP1, the RGB starts emitting pretty colors!

When an object approaches the IR detector, the RGB resets and starts its cycle again.

I picked up a Pum Lantern from Solarbotics as a test project to get me familiar with soldering and electronic components. The lantern has a solar cell that stores power all day and then releases it in pleasant “pums” of multicoloured light all night. Brilliant!

I had a bit of a hard time learning how to solder properly but this video helped me a lot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_NU2ruzyc4

The final product. A couple of the LEDs don’t shine as bright, which I suspect have something to do with the type of resistors I used.

Pretty colors!