Igor Forgor

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  • 10 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 6th, 2025

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  • This particular project you might be able to get away without soldering if you use a breakout / expansion board like shown and just screw terminal down the wires. If you are feeling a bit more ambitious, you could design a PCB and have it fabricated for you by a service such as jlcpcb or pcbway

    Should you still require soldering:

    There are soldering stations, irons and guns that have automatic or trigger pull solder feed which can help with single handed operation - the cheaper feed solder guns will do well for something larger like through hole for simple projects like this. Id get some heavy weights, some kind of board stand/clamps, and kapton tape in a heavy / mounted to desk holder do you can pull tape off and use it to put on the board to hold things down / together / insulate other parts from slipping with the iron tip.

    If you are just doing wire to wire joints, there are some heat shrink solder couplings that you can put on like its heat shrink over twisted wires and heating it over 150C with a heat gun will solder it together (e.g. electriduct).

    I haven’t personally had much luck with helping hands but ymmv. Soldering mat is good for spilled solder drops or if you accidentally hit the tip on the table. Solder flux (get in a syringe or squeeze bottle) helps a ton with getting a good joint. Also, some isopropyl alcohol and cotton swabs / a rag / a toothbrush are good for cleaning the flux off once you are done - if you dont do this, the joint can corrode down the line. You will also want a fume extractor; basically a fan with a carbon filter, similar to an air purifier. This will keep the flux fumes out of your face and lungs.

    A hotplate and some tweezers could also help with surface mount stuff since you can just use the weights to hold it down and poke at stuff while letting the hotplate do the heating /soldering

    To sum it up

    Things you WILL need to solder:

    • solder (leaded probably better; just wash hands)
    • flux (syringe or squeeze bottle)
    • soldering iron/ gun (perhaps with wire feed)
    • some kind of stand/weights for holding the boards / wires
    • tweezers
    • fume extractor

    Things I think would really help:

    • silicone mat
    • isopropyl alcohol and swabs / rag / tissues
    • kapton tape (or other polyamide tape, the orangey stuff)
    • normal heatshrink tubing/insulation

    Nice to have but might not be necessary:

    • hotplate
    • heatshrink solder couplings


  • The total seats / number of districts is capped and set for each state. It should be uncapped but that is besides the point

    . The redistricting / gerymandering makes use of packing (putting as many X voting areas into a single district to give them less voting power by basically wasting their vote since their candidate wouldve won that distric anyways) and cracking (splitting X voting areas up into multiple districts which will be majority Y voting).

    This means that with even numbers of X and Y voting people, they can be partitioned so that 9/10 districts for example are 55-45 for Y, and the remaining X voting people can be packed into the last district. The end result is Y winning 90% of the districts with only 50% of the overall support.