Soldering the jumpers - front or back

[paradoxicator]

Hello - thank you for your excellent work! I just wanted to clarify the jumpers - I wasn't understanding if the jumpers needed to be soldered on the front or back of the PCB..

I have completed the whole build, but I soldered it on the back (instead of the battery/front side). After looking at some pictures of prior questions/issue posts, I noticed that there was a picture of the jumpers soldered on the front side.

Please forgive this newbie if this is a stupid question. I have never built one with jumpers like this before.

[raeedcho]

Hi! The jumpers need to be soldered on the front side, under the battery. In hindsight, I probably should have designed it the other way, but that's how it is.

If you've already soldered the jumpers but haven't done the rest, there are a few easy fixes that I think might work:

• First, if nothing else is done, then just flip the PCBs around--they're mirror images, so there's no problem
• If you haven't socketed the microcontroller yet, I believe you can socket that "upside-down", if you're okay with that. The downside is that if you then move to another keyboard and use the same microcontroller, you might have to be aware of how to connect things.
• If things are all soldered, you might have no choice but to desolder some things. If you've never desoldered anything before, I suggest getting some braided solder wick and watching some YouTube videos on desoldering.

Good luck!

[KastenTaco]

Please make clarify the build instructions accordingly. I've burnt through a Nice!Nano because of this...

[paradoxicator]

I actually completed everything before I realized this.. I soldered it on the correct side and desoldered the back with a solder wick. Thank you for the clarification! It's a great board!

[AngryTacoEater]

It's great indeed! Didn't mean to sound snarky. Just frustrating when this happens. Would be a shame if others have this happen. The Nice!Nano is pricy to burn up.

[raeedcho]

Sorry you burnt out a microcontroller!

The instructions are actually in the readme already--the first instruction, as it happens:

• Solder the jumpers underneath the microcontrollers

I could see how this could be easily missed, since it's not part of the "front" or "back" list of things to do. I wrote it this way though because it's the easiest thing to mess up, so it's best to do it first, in my opinion.

I'll try to clarify the readme a bit more though, as I suppose that language could be ambiguous. Thanks for pointing it out 🙂