Soldering the Mars Rover Shield
We are in the process of upgrading the first Mars Rover that we built for the New York Hall of Science. The goal is to upgrade its electronics so that the museum’s two rovers are identical and interchangeable. Here is a very brief video of Genevieve soldering the “Mars Rover Shield” that we designed. The shield, which is a complex circuit board that fits on top of an Arduino Mega, has 165-solder points, but the video is just a short clip that only shows her doing a few of them. She moves pretty fast, so she can complete a circuit board quite quickly. We used a macro lens on this video to see how close we could get. We like how we can see the solder melting and then solidifying around the pins as she does them. I chose this particular music because that was the music we were listening to when she was doing the work. I thought the lyrics fit pretty nicely: “Because I’m doing this for the thrill of it, killin’ it…”