What Are Your Projects This Weekend?

My first experiment this weekend, seeing if ephedra helps me concentrate or just tweaks me out (verdict: uncu-cu-cu-clear), led to my second one: finally completing this Hex Pummer Kit from Solarbotics. I started putting this together almost two years ago, finally giving up in a fit of pique after I installed the LEDs on the wrong side of the board. (Turns out they’re in upside down but still function.)

I write about electronics and technology for a living but I’m a wreck with a soldering iron, so I had thought I’d start teaching myself the basics by building some of these little Solarbotics projects. With my new Cold Heat Pro soldering iron I was able to knock out the last few bits of assembly—a couple of capacitors, the solar panel, and the battery pack—in short order.

(The Amazon reviews of the Cold Heat are strangely off-base in claiming it doesn’t work at all. It may not completely obviate a traditional iron, but for basic to-the-pad solders it works better than a regular iron does for a shaky-handed rube like me.)

Oh, what does the Hex Pummer do, you ask? It soaks up sunlight during the day, then turns on the LEDs with a bright flash which quickly fades to darkness—hence, the “pumm.”

What projects are you working on this weekend?