A Job

Smokey heat bathed my face from the soldering iron in my hand. Though the fumes of tin, lead and flux were sucked away almost immediately, my eyes watered from keeping rapt attention on my work. The wire in my right left hand dabbed in every couple of seconds, leaving a clean convex joint. Three more leads were left to connect and I would be done.

The TV-B-Gone was an small hobby board I was already familiar with. I knew where everything went and in what order to place items so the soldering would go the fastest. It was pretty fun to do, but this time it was more time consuming. My client had emailed me four days ago for five of these little toys to be made but with another dozen or so extra power codes to be used.

It wasn't that difficult, I knew how the AVR code ran and it was just a matter of slipping in the new lines. I couldn't find any reference on the net what models of TV they were meant to trigger though. Overall, I really didn't care. My client was willing to pay four times the normal price of a pre-assembled unit, plus shipping. That made up for more than the man-hours used to rig up the new code. With the profits, I would even be able to get a couple new wireless modules I'd been looking to play with.

I pressed my iron to the last through-hole pad and touched the end of my solder. The tip melted smoothly all around the pad and drew up in a perfect cone. My fan sucked away the last traces of flux which hovered smokey over the board. I flipped my iron off and holstered it on it's base. I set down the small bit of solder left in my hand and leaned back to stretch. It was just a matter of snipping off the extra leads after the soldering and I was finished. One more job done, and easily done at that. Now just to pop these in a box and Fedex would take care of the rest.