Remembering Electronics

It has been YEARS since I have taken the time to play with various small electronics parts...thinking on it, the last time that I made something was in university. Sure, I've taken apart computers and other electronic devices, but I haven't "made" anything really useful.

I've been wanting to make a AC-DC adjustable voltage power source. Starting with a space laptop charger, I thought that this would be a fun, yet easy project. Additionally, I found some extra ideas after a quick search on Instructables.com. However, I needed some parts. A voltage regulator. I found some at the local electronics shop here in Puyo (though, admittedly, it was not exactly what I was looking for). So, testing my design on a breadboard, then I moved it to a small perf board for soldering. After some trial and error in the soldering process, I finally got the board together, but it didn't work as well as expected. To this day, I'm still not really sure why. Perhaps my poor soldering techniques burned out one of the parts...perhaps. In any case, I had to push the project off to this side because, well, life happens.

Several weeks later, one of our portable fans stopped working...or rather, the on/off button stopped working. So, I decided to take it apart to try to fix/replace the on/off button. After taking the fan apart and finding the buttons, thankfully, this looked like something that I could actually fix. I could take off the rotation button (which we never used) and use it in the power button (which I did confirm, that the fan motor worked fine, but the button itself had simply quite working. But herein lies the new problem...desoldering. It took some practice, but after about 30 minutes I (re)developed some skill in desoldering with a suction tube. Now to try it on the fan board. I failed miserably in removing the power button in one piece, so I knew that I had to be much more careful when removing the rotation button, since that it the one that I wanted to keep in good, working condition. After spending several minutes and getting some assistance from my wife, we managed to successfully remove the rotation button. I quickly installed it in place of the power button and tested its functionality. It worked! I put everything back together and the fan is working wonderfully. Though it is nothing that will win awards, it did give me a lot of confidence that with practice and patience I CAN still have fun with electronics.

Enjoy!