Assembling an SDM Retro Display from 2019 and traversing though dead discord servers and shortened links to find an assembly guide
I had a bit of free time on Sunday and decided to take on a soldering project i picked up back in 2019
The Tickertape Retro Display was a kickstarter kit from 2019, it is essentially 6 alphanumeric led displays, a driver IC and a few extra leds to act as status indicators and colons if using the display as a clock.
After recieveing the kit I didn’t investigate it further, so it wasn’t until today that I relised that the first batch of PCBs were missing the silkscreen for LED orientation. Light Emiting Diodes (LEDs) are polarised, meaning they have a positive and negative side and can only be soldered in one way around. It’s customary to have a marking on the board to guide this.
The creator did notice this back in 2019, on the project’s discord server they shared a shortened link with a full assemply guide. This shortened link was now dead.
The project is still up on github but no assemply guide to be found and I didn’t feel like moving to a computer to load up a board viewing software to solve this.
Fortunatly the project’s tindie page of all places has high resolution photo graphs and a screen grab from the design software that shows the silkscreen for the LED orientation.
With that investigation completed, the rest of the process was pretty manageable, all components were able to be hand soldered. One tip I am grateful for hearing ages ago is using thinner solder when workign with SMD, it reduced the chance of completely swamping the smaller components.
as with all soldering, going from the shortest to the tallest item helps keeping access to all the solder pads, especialy important on this board with the colon LEDs nestled between the alphanumeric displays.
Now all im missing is a project to use it for.