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!