Project Update – I told you October was going to be progress galore……well it wasn’t the only big updates was flight computer related. SAFAC didn’t work and I would blame that mostly on my soldering skills this was my first time soldering tiny SMD components and it wasn’t too great, there were a lot of shorts on most of the fine pitched components and adding to all this the solder paste I chose wasn’t very easy to work with. Now there are two main “options” while choosing solder paste leaded and unleaded. Leaded solder paste is easier to work with because of its lower melting temperature, I didn’t know about this at the time of ordering so I went with unleaded solder paste specifically an SAC305 blend (Tin, silver and copper) I’m going a little off-topic but let me tell you, without a proper reflow setup (basically a fancy way of saying melting that solder) I can’t get the paste to melt properly unless I get the hot air gun real up close to the components. After learning this I’ve taken a step back and made an FC that is easier to solder. It’s called TFAC (Fig 1) Third Flyable Avionics Computer, it includes a faster processor (not that it is necessary) a magnetometer and a GNSS radio along with a couple other things. Also, some big updates were made to the website making it look a lot cleaner and nicer, this concludes the updates for October :)
(Fig 1) Front of TFAC
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