/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>1368642
No clue how you'd do it, but you can do pretty much anything discretely provided you have enough gates. Start with a big fucking truth table?

>>1331663
See:
>>1331259
>Is a 12v 46w power supply run through a piece of graphite enough to solder with?
By running a current through a piece of graphite as a soldering iron, he's at risk of putting a voltage across the wrong piece of the circuit he's working on. I was telling him that using some insulated nichrome wire around a copper or iron tip wouldn't have this problem; I was contrasting a nichrome diy iron to his graphite one, not to a conventional iron, which he misunderstood.

>>1331678
>solder still wouldn't adhere to it at all
This is why you pick a solid that solder wets to, such as copper or iron; things that are used for soldering iron tips. Copper isn't usually used because it dissolves too readily though, iron is a nice middle ground between being resistant to dissolving and wetting to solder. Also use soldering flux.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solderability

>helping hands
You're not going to be able to use those in every circumstance, especially if you're soldering a connection that's already inside an enclosure. There's a reason soldering irons always have a tip that solder wets to, and it's that it makes soldering much more convenient.

>Why does it even matter if I'm not soldering voltage sensitive components anyway?
It doesn't matter in that case, but it's still a potential downside of a piece of graphite. I've taken apart a couple of cheap irons and one Goot iron, and all had a tip that was grounded and an element that was isolated by way of some sort of fibreglass or ceramic. Buying a cheap iron that could have a faulty ground is a downside of buying a cheap iron, but note that many anons on /diy/ have had much success with less-than-expensive Hakko clones. All the soldering tweeters I could find on online stores had elements in each of the two tips, and each tip was almost certainly at the same potential, hence not putting any current through your components. If your iron plugs into the wall, any voltage across it isn't going to be good.