Congrats!!!!

Just wanted to put this up and say thanks to the folks at element14, I received the prize from the competition and just wanted to put up this pic.

The soldering station is amazing, and by happy coincidence some of the bits were out of stock so I was able to get select some spare tips up to the value of the items out of stock

Looks like now I'll have to clear a path to the bench in the workshop so I can actually get to work with it, instead of displaying it on the sofa! I really should because I have so many things to get on with.

Thank you again Element14/Farnell

Congratulations davegsm82 I wish you have fun time with your new devices. 

Congratulations davegsm82!   Have fun with your new tools .

Thank you Douglas!

Congratulations davegsm82 !

Maddie,

Ahhh, 286 systems, I remember them well.

Dubbie

This was fix on my own careless PCB designing. Two of us working on this project and this was the first time we were designing a PCB. We were using an stm32 and mc60 on the PCB. We used KiCAD for designing and he was working on Stm part and I am on MC60 part. We used txb0108 level shifter between them. We imported the footprint from snapeda or Mouser, dont really remember, since we were both working remotely some miscommunication happened and we end using a wrong pin numbers with smallest txbo108 package. Without knowing this we fabricated the PCB and assembled its components.

As you could imagine the PCB didn't work and after some debugging I found out the issue that we had the wrong pin numbers. I tested all other parts everything is good except this issue.

Since it is a very small package it was impossible to solder wires into the correct pins. I asked advice from some one who little bit more experienced than me on what to do. He said the same thing that since this was small package it is not possible to fix this and I should redo this.

But for me that was no option, we spent a lot of money on this, I needed it to work. So then I realized I couldn't solder on one pin but I could definitely solder two pins together. I took closer on the txb0108 IC. I am only using 6 pins on this IC (tx, rx, gnd, Output_enable, VCCA, VCCB). I want these to its appropriate places, I noticed some of the pins I could short together without any issue. After some sitting and soldering some pins together (in 3 places) and scratching  some other pins out, I finally fixed it, made it work and saved our asses.

My most dramatic fix was when I was doing A Level Chemistry. We had a PC in the lab which was meant to do some data logging. The teacher wasn't keen on it, he still insisted the BBC Master was better at data logging, but I knew him fairly well from working sound and lights in school productions. Starting the PC one morning it was sitting at the POST screen refusing to boot and ticking quietly to itself. Our home PC had failed a similar way a couple of months before so I had a good idea it was a "sticky" hard drive head. The head would park at shutdown and refuse to come out again at boot. I volunteered to take a look and walked up to the PC, got the rhythm of the ticking (the head trying to unpark) and then casually kicked it in the front panel in time with the next tick. Sure enough the BIOS scroll carried on and the OS started to boot. I went and sat back down. The teacher was momentarily speechless I had literally fixed his computer by kicking it!  Looking back I dread to think what would have happened if I'd kicked an expensive bit of school property and it hadn't fixed it.

Many years ago, when the rocks were just cooling from their magma stage, I was moonlighting at a small community hospital.  My full time job had me doing silly things like jumping out of airplanes with 100lbs of medical gear on my back into some rather nasty areas.  This was a SMALL hospital with just 2 cardiac beds.  The closest trauma 1 was at least one and a half hours away.  We had the first bed occupied and a second in route.  The cardiac monitor system on the second bed would not power on and the facility had been waiting a week for the system tech to come work on it.  The cardiologist was ready to try and reroute the inbound patient when I took a look at the system and saw that the power "button" on the membrane control panel was considerably worn.  As the cardiologist started to have his own dysrhythmia, I pulled out my handy dandy knife and cut three sides of the membrane control and pulled it down.  Sure enough the contact was worn beyond belief.  With the cardiologist yelling at me and me telling him NOT to reroute the patient, I ran down to the snack machine and bought a pack of Wrigley's Big Red gum.  The look on his face as I came running back in the room and popping a piece of the gum in my mouth was rather hilarious.  He was beet red as I took the inner wrapper, cut it down and folded it into a small square with the foil out.  I then framed the foil with dermapore tape and taped the control membrane back in place and powered on the system.  We were able to stabilize the patient without having him potentially suffering any more damage with the added transport time.  The patient went home a week and a half later and the facility had the machine replaced.  That is how I saved a patient with a quick electronic repair using a gum wrapper.