I recently purchased the Mini-POV3 from Make: Magazine. It’s a fun little kit designed by Limor from www.ladyada.net. The Mini-POV is a simple microcontroller-based kit which flashes 8 light emitting diodes in such a way that when waved through the air, a customized image or message appears to float in front of the viewer.


The Mini-POV was my first attempt at soldering… well anything. I was a little discouraged when building this kit, because I could only get half of the LED’s to light. I spent several hours trying to troubleshoot the circuit with a volt-ohm meter. I determined that I must have had some cold solder joints. I attempted to re-solder nearly every component on the board to no avail.

Frustrated, I shelved the project for a few days while I worked on the “Build your own electronic game kit” mentioned in my previous post. The “lessons learned” from the electronic game kit led me to suspect that perhaps I had ruined the diodes in my Mini-POV kit from excessive heat. I desoldered the components from the board, and re-connected everything on my prototype board. Okay, so it’s a Radio Shack 300-in-1 Learning Lab, that thing is freaking awesome.

At any rate. Everything worked well on the prototype board, unfortunately I did some damage to the Mini-POV printed circuit board during the desoldering phase. This weekend I’ll head out to the local electronics store and pick up a small pre-fabricated board and give it another go.

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