Cockpit building is a great learning experience. For instance, I have discovered that one of the skills I am not blessed with is soldering. In paricular soldering pieces of wire onto the contacts of a hacked keyboard that a are less than 2mm apart

Now I know there's alot of talent on these boards so has anyone devised a method of hacking a keyboard that doesn't involve quite so tricky soldering? I'm on a tight budget here and I'm trying to use what I have to hand before I go out and buy some expensive encoder boards to wire my switches to.

Any help greatly appreciated (before I pull any more hair out)

Cheers

Martin

Lots of practice is the answer.
However it is no point doing the practice if the tools are not right and you do not follow the rules.

1. Is your soldering iron right for the job. For the work you described a 40 watt with temperature control is the go.

2. Is the soldering iron tip the right size for the job?  Is it it clean?

3. I use resin cored solder. This comes in different thicknesses.  Have you the right thickness solder ?

4. Is the surfaces you are going to solder together clean? I use mircroscrub or very fine emery paper to clean the surfaces. This includes the pigtails on components.

5. Are you pre-tining the surfaces with clean solder first? This is very important.

6.  The rule is with the resin core solder is that when you bring the solder to the tip of the iron you want the resin to flow before the solder or you will get dry joints. To get this to happen always cut the old last use end of the solder off. This end has the solder melted over the resin core so the resin won't flow correctly. So always make sure you have a clean cut on the end of your solder before you put it to the work surfaces to be joined.

7. OK now it's time to solder. The idea is to put the tip of the iron onto the pcb and the pigtail of the component to heat the two surfaces . How much heat/time is practice. The tip of the iron must be pre-tineed!When the surfaces are at the right temperature you bring the solder to the pigtail and allow the solder to flow onto the pigtail and then you direct it down onto the the copper track of the pcb.You should have a nice clean flow and when the joint cools it should be shinny.


So there you go -- some basic rules to get you started soldering away.

The keyboard hack trick should keep you busy for many many hours.You need to find a free software utility that will decode all keystrokes and display them in Notepad. I used "Anykey" but I don't remember where I got it from.

have fun
cheers
chuck

I would be interested to know how you get on with this.
I tried it myself recently but when I stripped the keyboard down the pc board did not have copper strips as such but were made of some dark grey material.  Try as I might I could not even tin these connections, let alone solder a wire to them.
These strips were then just held on the the clear plastic sheets (with Cu traces on to take them to the actual keys) by the pressure of the closed keyboard casing.
I gave up in the end and bought a BU0836X.

Den

Matt Thomas wrote on Apr 23^rd, 2009 at 3:49pm:


Good advice there Matt.

And if I did not say it yet........ welcome to the Homebuild Cokkpits forum section and SimV.

best,

.....................john

Matt
I've been looking at your avatar trying to figure out why you look familiar.............your the guy from DIY/Rodger Dodger  I've always liked your guys' simple approach to desktop simming keyboard controls, Ive incorporated some of your ideas.......Welcome to Simv
Romflyer

Matt I look forward to seeing them......in this thread http://www.simviation.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1238537369 there are a few pictures of what I did with ideas that you gave me.....thanks 

Matt Thomas wrote on Apr 26^th, 2009 at 3:02pm:


I can tell you that my second attempt using dowelling and drilling was a dramatic improvement  .......square peg in round whole