Velleman MK150-VP Shaking Soldering Kit

This is a fun kit that is not very difficult to solder, great for beginners.

the kits used to have a nice solid square switch and it went in easy and worked fine the first time. this new round tilt switch is crap. the holes are too close together so the leads from the switch are pulled out of the switch and also want to short on the sides of the switch. this round thing is terrible. tried to get one of these kits to go with one i bought and built 13 years ago to have a pair and it's the only diff. and the diff between a great kit and a not so good one, look up MERS3, discontinued. for shame vellmanBuild quality:get the right switch vellman

I researched the micro controller used in this little guy and was quite impressed how 4 data lines could control 7 dice LEDs. All from a tiny 8 pin micro controller. A lot of thought went into this design. But it would be nice to show how we could tinker with the inner workings of the code. I've got a microchip programmer to study it with, so that should be a challenge in itself. I also found a dual dice version of this kit too.

This kit is ok up until having to handle the tilt switch. The instructions aren’t clear for this component, I’ve gone through 3 dice and on every single one the tilt switch messes up. The instructions say solder the lead to what looks like the casing of the switch… when I do that.. the plastic piece on the inside melts causing the ball inside the switch to no longer move.. I’ve tried installing it onto pcb without soldering the lead to the case and that didn’t worth either. I wish there were clearer instructions on how to properly install the tilt switch. (I’ve watched tons of videos and nothing helped!)

everything was there and works as it should