First stepper

I started assembling the components for the first of my stepper motor driver boards today. The one shown on the instructions on the reprap site is red, but mine are all green. The printing on mine is much less clear, too, so I have the website page saved as a file on my laptop, and I am scrutinising the pictures and text on screen rather closely.
Also, none of my boards have been printed or perhaps cut square, so the fixing holes in the corners don't line up.
I shall have to mark each fixing hole individually to mount the boards on Faith.


This is the first board on which I shall be soldering surface mount components. I began with the 0.22 uF ceramic capacitor (as it says in the text), also known as the 220 nF capacitor as it is marked on the board. Apparently. I can't make it out on my own board!

For those of you new to surface mount, this little capacitor (which I am assured is large - ha!) comes in a little strip of packaging. I tried to take a photograph, but the packaging is clear, and the components tiny, and the camera couldn't find it to focus!
You have to peel back the clear plastic film from the back of the packaging to get at the capacitor. And then it jumps right out...
it is a fawn-coloured thing, tiny as I said before (!) and I am wearing grey trousers. It jumped towards me. I had to search for it; I could barely spot it on my lap!

The instructions say to colour it with a red or black pen, to distinguish it from the other similar but differently rated capacitors, but as I had only a green marker pen, mine is green. Colouring it wasn't easy, either!

Here it is. You can just about see it in the photo' (the camera clearly couldn't, or couldn't clearly!)

Oh this is going to be fun, isn't it?!

On a lighter note, I've got my soldering tutorial up on the Builders' Wiki, with a lot of practical technical help from Renoir, and my purple RJ45 cable arrived.
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