This was my first major disaster. I’d decided I needed a noise generator for synthesising percussive sounds and other noise-related duties. I’d also started looking at surface mount (SMD) soldering as many of the interesting projects I’d been looking at involved SMD.
Surface mount soldering is quite different to what I’ve been doing so far, which is all “through hole” stuff. SMD components mount directly to one side of the board and are generally much smaller than their through hole counterparts.
With this in mind, I picked up a GMSN Pure Noise PCB/panel.
Edit: looking back at this, the soldering really makes me cringe. I’m not surprised it didn’t work!
Having watched some YouTube videos on SMD soldering, I managed to put it together. It was very tricky, but it all looked OK. Then I plugged it in and it didn’t do anything at all. While debugging, I realised I had mounted the tiny transistor pair chip backwards! While trying to remove it, I lifted 5 of the 6 solder pads for the chip right off the board, effectively destroying it.
This really knocked my confidence with SMD and I decided that, rather than order another PCB, I’d try to build a noise generator myself and fit it behind the panel.
I found a nice schematic for a similar noise circuit and built that on a perma-proto breadboard.
Once I’d sorted out an issue with power to the main IC, it worked just fine and fit nicely behind the panel.