This week, we continued the board assembly process by soldering pins on all of our test boards. Unfortunately, we had a slight setback when a few of the boards had the pins soldered before the chips were soldered in place, resulting in quite a bit more work than anticipated. 

Backtracking required use of the hot air gun to re-heat the solder around the pins, being careful not to melt the incorporated plastic, yet burn our fingers as much as possible. Then, we used copper wick to remove any remaining solder until the board was once again flush, and we were ready to incorporate the chip. 

In total, we will be testing seven different chips across three models. This will allow us to choose the most accurate, reliable and easy-to-use chip for our needs, given that different accelerometers could have different levels of drift, have different levels of calibration difficulty, and many other factors.

Some pics of the chip soldering:

-Sean