Ready, Set, Solder!

At Blue Clover Devices, we've made it a point to Keep Learning! One of the ways we do this is hosting workshops for our beavers to learn from one another. As a hardware company, one of the skills we're proud to impart on every beaver is soldering!

Our Shenzhen beavers honed their soldering skills in a big soldering event separated into three parts: a workshop, proficiency exam, and grand competition!

Part One: The Workshop

While some of our beavers are expert technicians, others were soldering for the first time! Since we believe in Succeeding as a Team, we paired up experienced technicians with newcomers.

Lucy, our Operations Director, was proud to mention that by the end of the first workshop, everyone could properly solder at least 2 lights!

Part Two: The Exams

The following week, beavers gathered again to take a timed exam to test their proficiency. Despite having only a single practice workshop, everyone managed to get one working light on their board in the time allotted!

As you can tell by everyone's concentration, good soldering requires meticulous attention to detail, as well as good hand-eye coordination!

Of course, we're used to having overachievers in our beaver lodge. 7 of the examinees were able to actually solder on 4 lights in the allotted time, and 4 managed to get 5 lights on!

Part Three: The Competition

In China, Christmas is a minor holiday (especially compared to Lunar New Year), but to keep things festive our Shenzhen team hosted the big competition (and of course a Christmas party)!

Congratulations to Hongbing (1st place), Wilson (2nd place), and Xiaogui (3rd place)! They are officially welding masters (at least by our standards).

If you're curious to see what prizewinning welding work looks like, you can see it here:

And again:

Oh, and I think the winners deserve more face time in this blog post. Here are paparazzi shots (and my corny captions):

In Conclusion

At Blue Clover Devices, we're proud to be a hardware company that specializes in product development, design, and fabrication. This means we also encourage our beavers to take an interdisciplinary approach to learning new skills. This holiday season, we focused on soldering!

P.S. if you can't tell by our awesome soldering masters, we're really good at making PCBA. You can learn about it here: https://www.bcdevices.com/pcba/