Getting Over My Soldering Aversion

Fear of soldering. Well, not fear, aversion. I think a lot of us have it. pnp good solder bad.

But there's a project coming up that I'll need soldering for, so might as well try it.

The $2 spy camera

I bought one of these "a9 wifi spy cameras" that are downright ubiquitous online. I picked up one at a discount store for $2, but I could never get it working. Turns out it's actually a really common problem where the internal Lipos will start to swell because of a hard-coded boot loop. So I popped it open, and that's exactly what had happened. Spicy pillow battery. Good thing recycled vape batteries are perfect for this kind of thing.

AI as a confidence booster

I think one of the things that's made me more confident with these types of projects is AI. I can now take a picture of each battery to make sure they're compatible. Learned a lot about protected vs unprotected cells and the funky numbers on each lipo pouch... did you know they're the actual measurements?

The result

So anyways. I did the soldering successfully! The camera works! It's not great so I don't know where I'll ever use it! But that's okay!