Don't reach for your soldering iron when looking somewhere else.

(I only did that once)

Bob

I did it twice, as a 7-year old.

 

Make sure when installing ICs in sockets that pin 1 IS pin 1.

...especially before applying power.

 

Wires are resistors too. This is easy to forget when you only usually deal with tiny currents.

 

Please contribute to this thread. It already has some really good stuff in it but there is certainly more wisdom out there.

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Bypass capacitors are not optional. Knowing why bypass capacitors are not optional is not optional.

Every passive component is a resistor. It is also a capacitor. It is also an inductor. The name is just a handy way to say what it mostly is. The validity of the name is inversely proportional to the frequency of the signal.

When soldering keep in mind that components are a lot more robust than you’d expect. They are also a lot less robust than you’d prefer.

When working with new devices always find a datasheet, and look it over, whether you expect to need it or not.

Success is meeting the goals of the project. If you don’t have an explicit goals, success is impossible.

A schematic is worth 10x10¹⁰⁰⁰ words, as an order of magnitude estimate on the low side.

 

Not all power factor correction capacitors contain built-in discharge resistors.

 

An amplifier is an oscillator that doesn’t quite have enough phase shift.

 

The threshold voltage of a MOSFET is not the voltage at which the MOSFET is ON.

Wires soldered to a PCB always break. This can be remedied feeding them up through a hole big enough for the insulation, then the stripped part down through a hole and soldered on the bottom.

 

An amplifier is an oscillator that doesn’t quite have enough phase shift.

An oscillator is an amplifier where the feedback is intentional and controlled.

 

Wires soldered to a PCB always break. This can be remedied feeding them up through a hole big enough for the insulation, then the stripped part down through a hole and soldered on the bottom.

when I studied metallurgy, I learned that this was caused by the formation of an extremely brittle copper-lead alloy at a point just after the wire stopped looking “tinned”. I studied metallurgy in 1985, well before tin-lead solder was made illegal. I would be curious to know if wires still break in the same place with lead-free solder.
Securing the wire to the board as you describe is a requirement of most safety standards.