Mk149 love tester not working

Kits Mini Kits Range
1

Hello all.
I’ve just finished soldering the love tester but can’t seem to get it to work. Here are two pictures, I hope they are clear enough. The project is for 5-6 year olds to play with so I covered the man/woman symbols with hearts.

dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/107 … G_4653.JPG
dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/107 … G_4655.JPG

Here is what I know so far. I’ve checked all the diodes with the multimeter, they seem to be installed with the correct polarity. I’ve checked the capacitors against the circuit diagram and they also appear to installed correctly. When I turn the power switch on, the topmost red LED flashes briefly. I’ve checked the voltage on the battery, its 9.5V. I’ve also checked the voltages on the board. I don’t know what those should be, but most of the points appear to be getting some power. IC2 gets pretty hot if I leave it on for more than a minute or so.

Thanks for any help.

2

Some soldering look very poor (hard to see exactly: photo is high res but not sharp).

3

Thanks for your response. I agree that I have a lot to learn with soldering (thats why I got this kit :slight_smile: ). That said I dont see any that look bridged (the two that look bridged in the picture have connected pads).

I’ll try to get a clearer picture of the joints and post it this evening.

4

Ok, thanks!

5

If you need help with learning how to solder you could search “soldering tutorial” on youtube.
I have seen some good ones.

6

Thanks to all that replied here. I took the board to a friend at my lab that works with electronics. He identified some bad joints for me, so it turns out it was my poor soldering that was at fault. Now I have lights but no piezo buzzer. I’ll check the rest of the points, now that I know what to look for, and see if that fixes the buzzer.
Thanks again!

7

Did you check the polarity for the buzzer?
You may also want to check T1 and T2 to make sure you have the correct part number in the right place.

Glad to hear it’s getting there.