am i soldering right, does this look good? it feels strong enough
Yes, they look good. You don't need to use that much solder though.
>>954576
Soldering electronics isn't about mechanical strength, but conductivity. Components which need to be physically held in place (sockets for example) are usually designed so that their pins have an interference fit with the holes in the PCB.
To answer your question though, yes those solder joins look good.
>>954580
Well I just soldered some pins on it so I can use it on a breadboard, so I felt like some strength there would be nice to have when removing and inserting and stuff.
Thanks guys!
>>954576
they look nice OP, shiny means strong, dull means cold joint. I can never solder that good on tiny pcb.
>>954576
Too much solder.
>>954618
It's a bit much, but not enough to compromise anything.
OP, you don't have to cover the whole wire in the solder joint, if you have enough solder to cover the pad and smoothly wick 1-2mm up the wire, that's the perfect amount. The solder joint should be a slightly concave cone/pyramid shape. If it starts to look like a ball/dome, you've used too much.
However, unless the solder balls are touching it shouldn't negatively affect the function of the device. It's bad practice because it wastes solder and because in some circumstances temperature changes can make the solder brittle leading to excess solder to become dislodged and potentially short the device.
I don't think OP's joints are bad enough to warrant redoing them, this isn't the fucking space shuttle, and for a newbie they're actually pretty damn good.
>>954576
too much solder, it would fail inspection
>>954626
why would they fail inspection?
>>954634
too much solder
should have used these so the display sits upright so it takes up less space on the breadboard.
>>954580
>Soldering electronics isn't about mechanical strength
it is, in a way.
a cold soldered joint can conduct just fine if its left alone.
mechanical stress will impair conductivity and eventually break the bond all together.
two sides of the same coin, really.
>>954647
still does not explain why it fails other than for appearance and being wasteful. in my opinion having excess solder without it being close to the other joints does not make it a fail. wasteful yes any other reason nope. high temps whether excess or not doesn't change the brittleness either.... in fact it would take more heat to make it brittle than if op used a tiny bit.
>>954764
>Inspector inspects board
>puts it in the box with the other boards that fail QC
>b-but it works fine!
>Chinese factory worker gets fired for questioning his supervisors and wasting $0.0002 worth of solder
Criteria for visual inspection are often arbitrary and not the same as visual fault analysis.
>>954753
So will two wires pushed against each other.
A proper solder joint is different from a cold joint, in that the same piece of solder has dissolved in all the pieces to be joined.
>>954764
Excess solder is a fail because the excess solder prevents inspection of the interface.
It could be fine. It's probably fine. But there's no way to see if it's fine or not because the solder's in the way.
>>954768
In a factory that's producing boards by hand, a board like that would go into the "rework" pile.
