Begin by placing the amplifier board in a vise so you can easily work on it. Heat up your soldering iron to 650-700 degrees F and get some solder and hand tools ready!

Power capacitor


We'll start with the power supply capacitor. This cap isn't required if you're powering off of batteries or a good quality supply, but if you're using wall adapter, this might give you just a little cleaner power especially with high amplification levels
Capacitors are polarized, they have to be placed in the right way!
The longer lead goes into the pad marked +
Place the capacitor against the PCB and bend the two leads out so that it sits flat.
Flip over the board so you can solder the two pads
Solder in both pads, heating the pad and pins at the same time with the edge of the soldering iron and dipping a little solder in.

The ground (-) pin may be a little tough to solder since the ground plane acts like a large heat sink
Clip down both of the long leads using diagonal cutters so they are nice and neat

Speaker Terminals


You'll want to do this step, where we add the terminal blocks for the speaker outputs. Otherwise you'd have to solder wires directly to the board which isn't suggested.
Place two of the 2-pin blue terminal blocks so that the holes point outward
These don't have long leads to bend, so some tape can keep them in place while you solder
Flip over the board again and solder in all 4 pads.
You don't need to clip them because they are already quite short

Remove the tape once you've checked your work

Power and Line In Terminal Blocks


There's also terminal blocks for Power and line-in. These are optional, you can use the DC jack and headphone jack but if you want to hard-wire in, use these instead of soldering directly to the board!
Place the 2-pin and 3-pin terminal blocks so the holes point out
Tape can help here, to keep the blocks in place while you solder.
Solder in all the connections
Check your work before moving onto the Basic Test procedure

This guide was first published on Mar 12, 2014. It was last updated on Mar 12, 2014.

This page (Assembly) was last updated on Mar 12, 2014.

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