Radiant Rainbow

Description

This is a rainbow solder-it-yourself through-hole kit that uses self-flashing red, yellow, green, and blue LEDs.

This board is part of our Alpenglow Beginning Soldering weather-themed series. This is a step up from our Happy, Angry, Chilly, and Surprising boards, featuring more LEDs and resistors! On this board you can practice using reference designators to match parts to their proper places on the PCB.

The radiant rainbow has the most LEDs out of all our weather boards with 11 LEDs. Instead of using just one CR2032 battery at 3V, we have included 2 CR2016 batteries that you stack (place in series) to create 6V and ensure that all the colors are bright and stay blinking for many hours! The purple soldermask combines with the red, yellow, green, and blue LEDs to create an almost full rainbow.

Details

Radiant Rainbow is the most colorful of all our weather boards. It's sporting 11 LEDs! This board is great for beginners wanting to practice their through hole soldering skills.

Build Instructions

Collapse

1

Step 1: Solder Resistors

Start with the resistors. Match the resistor to the matching designator on the board.

If you're having trouble keeping the board from moving when soldering you can use a piece of tape to hold the board down. Just be sure not to have the tape too close to where you are soldering your joint!

IMPORTANT: There was a last minute resistor value change. Be sure to solder resistors in order of their reference designators and not the printed values on the board.
2

Step 2: Solder the Battery Holder and the Switch

The battery holder should "click" into place which makes it easy to solder!

*Note: The battery holder and switch are made of metal so they get hot when soldering. Be careful touching them during and directly after soldering!
3

Step 3: Solder the LEDs

*Note: New kits have colored lens LEDs

The color for each LED is marked on the front. You can pick which LEDs you want to solder in first but I suggest going in the following order: RED, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE. I find it helpful to only solder in 1 leg and make sure the LED is laying flat against the board before soldering the other leg into place.

When Soldering LEDs I find it helpful to solder one side and check that it's straight before soldering down the other side. If the LED is not sitting flat you can reflow the solder joint while lightly pressing on the top of the LED.