VellemanMK101 Flashing Led Sweetheart

Mine was missing two resistors. You need a low wattage soldering iron. I recommend 63/37 solder if you are ok with using tin/lead solder. It is much easier to learn with as it has a lower melting temp than the non leaded solder. PC boards don’t do well with being heated up and staying hot while you try to figure out what you are doing. Use just enough to fill the hole around the part lead going through it. Expect to ruin a few if you are new to soldering. These are fun to make and they do something when you are finished.

No problems with mine! They all light up as they should. I made two mistakes while working on it:1: I accidentally placed some of the resistors in the wrong solder holes and soldered them in. I assumed they were all the same, but they are not. Check the colored lines on them and follow the instructions carefully.2: I accidentally soldered more than one point at the same time on two occasions, thus bridging a few connections. I wound up using an xacto knife to cut the bridge on one, and tried to desolder the other.When I placed the battery in, a line of LED's did NOT work. It turns out that the capacitor I thought I bridged with an LED actually *needed* to be bridged. It is difficult to explain, but I basically re-bridged the connection I thought I had initially bridged by mistake and then my heart was fully lit!I wound up cutting the legs off of the components after soldering certain ones in the wrong place. It was easy enough to desolder them and re-place them even after I cut the legs down to small nibs. It was a little tedious, but so long as you are putting down good solder joints, you should be good.The kit DOES **NOT** come with the switch I installed on mine. I bought a bag of switches online from eBay a while back for a different project, and saw that someone here used a switch on theirs, which I thought was a great idea! If you want to keep the battery in the back at all times (instead of having to take it out to make the heart stop, and put it in to make it light up again - annoying), you'll need a switch just like this. It was pretty easy, the switch should come with three metal prongs on the back that stick out (see: https://www.amazon.com/Uxcell-a12013100ux0116-Position-Vertical-Switch/dp/B007QAJUUS/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1489460093&sr=8-3&keywords=small+switch). All you need are two of the prongs. Cut a prong off from the side (NOT the center), so that now you have two, a side and center prong. Solder a red wire into the board and into a prong. Solder the red wire that comes out of the battery compartment into the other prong. It should be as easy as that! Basically the prong you cut off is the "off" side, and the prongs on the other side are the on side - the switch will bridge the connection between the two, thus completing the circuit.The switch fits perfectly on the side as I have it and can easily be hot glued. My last tip would be to take a piece of sand paper and rough up the plastic part where you will glue it. This will give the glue a better place to catch on to and will give a very tight hold. I also hot glued the solder points on the switch so that nothing accidentally touches it.I hope this helps anyone who is reading this. Crafts like these show our loved ones that we care enough to build something (nearly) from scratch for them, and I can't wait to give this to my special somebody. :)

I bought this product to make as a gift in addition to other things on Valentine's Day. When the kit arrived, it was a bit smaller than expected, but still had that "Cute" appeal to it. I opened everything up and counted everything out and there was an extra LED and everything else was fine.The board is relatively poor in quality, but not as poor as some of the reviews. It's certainly not something you want to solder too long and the pads do lift easily. If you are careful, and have some patience though, you should be able to assemble this within an hour or so easily. The instructions are relatively decent, but I don't understand the third screw near the bottom. Even though it is a small board, the LEDs are bright and make an impressive show. Overall a quick, decent project. The seller perhaps charges a little much for this kit, but it was fun.

It was a good challenge for a beginner with good instructions. The only downside was they shorted me an LED light so I had to connect two pads together to complete the circuit.

I purchased this kit for my husband not knowing quite what to expect who loves DIY kits but hasn't soldered in a while. The kit came packaged a clam shell with all parts in working order and nothing missing. Clear and easy instructions are also included on the cardboard insert. The kit took about an hour or so to put together. The heart is powered by a 9 volt battery which also acts as the stand for the heart. The LED's are all red and flashes from the inside of the heart to the outside like a beating heart.We did use lead free solder (came with the soldering iron) so there were a few difficulties in getting some items to solder correctly, so I do suggest you use 60/40 lead instead. While the kit is fairy straight forward and simple I would not suggest it as your first kit. I do disagree with the comment that you must use thin solder and a very thin tip with superior temperature control, we did not, we used your average pencil style soldering iron and solder. The issue comes down to technique and skills as there are a few tight spots. The whole point of these great little kits is to learn basic circuitry and soldering and this kit does that.Great kit, would suggest it for all you techies out there to give to your sweetheart as a gift! It's quite cute!

I got this to make for my boyfriend for valentine's day. I'm new to soldering and wanted to use this for practice. The solder points are very crowded and the contacts can fall off easily. When I finished two of the lines of LEDs wouldn't light. One line was due to a short, which was easy to fix with a needle. The other was because one of the solder points had fallen off. I had to jumper the circuit using solder wick. I enjoyed parts for this project and it definitely can work, but I would not recommend it to a beginner due to the poor quality of the solder contacts.

This was made correctly but some of the LED lights did not work. This completely ruins the effect of the lights on the heart. Avoid.

Over half of led's dont work and when soldering components the pcb disintegrated

I bought this as a gift for my boyfriend and he seemed to love it. Finished the kit within about an hour and kept all the leads on so that he could mess around with crossing them and have visual feedback of the effects with the LED's. Simple but his favourite one yet.

Good fun to build, my Wife did it, and thought it was good as she does help with real tech Boards.

Badly made thing. The PCB is of bad quality - the soldering pads are not covered by solder and solder is not so easy sticking to them. My son destroyed few lines trying to solder parts there. additionally the PCB is routed bad and in some places the lines goes too close to the soldering pads - it is hard to solder even if one has an experience. I would not reccommend it for beginners and for others it is not needed.