Assembling the Mini Mood Light v1 Kit

The Mini Mood Light is a small interactive and reprogrammable coloured light generator circuit.  The mood light consists of a Texas Instruments MSP430 micro controller connected to two RGB LEDs, four buttons and some supporting components all on a custom circuit board.

A kit with the circuit board and all the required components is available from http://partfusion.com/products/mini-mood-light-v1/, along with code and instructions for setting up a suitable Linux development environment.

The process of assembling the Mini Mood Light v1 kit isn't particularly difficult but it can take over 30 minutes depending on your soldering proficiency.

The minimum required tools are a soldering iron, some solder, a side cutters and pliers.  Additional useful tools include a helping hand stand, a multimeter, a soldering iron stand, a solder sucker and some solder wick.

Step 1: Identifying Components

So to start you should unpack and identify each component and sort them into the order that they will be soldered.

One mini mood light v1 circuit board.
One blue diode.
One 47 kilo ohm resistor (yellow, violet, orange, gold).
Two 390 ohm resistors (orange, white, brown, gold).
Four 330 ohm resistors (orange, orange, brown, gold).
One 2200 pico farad ceramic capacitor.
One 0.1 micro farad ceramic capacitor.
Four tactile switches.
One three legged voltage regulator (MCP1702).
Two 2.2 micro farad aluminium capacitors.
Two four legged RGB LEDs.
One Darlington array 16 pin IC and socket (ULN2003A).
One MSP430 MCU 14 pin IC and socket (MSP430G2211).
One 9 volt battery connector.