![]() When it came time for my heat, I settled into my station and got things squared away. I watched enough of the action to get an idea of the workflow. ![]() There were a bunch of shared tools and supplies too, like desoldering braid, solder suckers, flux pens, and an LED tester. Each station had a good quality soldering station, a lighted magnifier, a few hand tools like flush cutters, pliers, and the all-important tweezers, and a roll of fine solder. It looked like everything was laid out really well. I signed up for the 4:30 heat and hung around a bit to get enough of an idea of what to do to not embarrass myself. As he did last year, Al Williams was running the station. ![]() I decided to get the challenge out of the way as quickly as possible, so I started sharking around the table early in the afternoon on Friday. At best I’d learn what my limits are, and at worst I’d fail spectacularly and provide grist for a “Fail of the Supercon” post. I entered mainly because I wanted to see what was possible coming in raw. All my soldering experience has been with through-hole components, and while I also used to doing some production soldering on fine-pitch connectors, the whole surface-mount thing is new to me. Now, while I’m pretty handy with a soldering iron, I was under no illusion that I would be at all competitive. ![]() Which is why I was glad that I set only one real goal for my first Supercon: take the SMD Soldering Challenge. Supercon is something like that - a Disney-esque theme park for hackers that will exhaust you if you don’t have a plan, and if you don’t set reasonable expectations. It’s easy to spot such people, collapsed on a bench or dragging exhausted kids around while trying to make their way to the next must-see attraction. First-time visitors to Disneyworld often naively think they’re going to “do” the park in three days: one day for the Magic Kingdom, one day for Epcot, and one day for everything else.
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