Waveform generator Kit build

The Bitscope has a wave generator built in, but I felt that, as part of my soldering apprenticeship, I should build a kit that would add to the understanding of an oscilloscope, so I had ordered a five dollar XR2206 based waveform generator kit which arrived last week and we will travel through the gauntlet of welding it together. This is basically what you receive in one of these kits, components, main board, case and difficult to read instructions :

The components, along with an acrylic case to hold the item. What is not shown in the photo is the missing fifth non-polarised capacitor which I later found stuck up on of the knobs. Twenty-eight components and a case. There would be over seventy soldered joints to be done and I was surprised how my skills have improved over the last few kits.

In true Blue Peter fashion, here is one I made earlier:

I mean ok, some things were not perfectly aligned, but that is the nature of these fiddly little kits, they are large enough to be completed, yet small enough to be difficult and frustrating. However, a pat on my back for completing this with my sausage fingers and increasingly dodgy eyeballs.

The case almost made me lose it, perhaps I was approaching the end of my patience after soldering everything, but the case components needed to be stripped of their protective paper, and then the uncooperative puzzle needed to be assembled. It was indeed a wriggly little thing and some of my slightly off tolerance soldering of the bits came back to haunt me. 

The input was supposed to be 12V but to test I used a 5V supply, but that was enough to prove that the new gizmo worked. I tested later with the correct voltage and the output was definitely better. The kit was completed in about an hour and a half, it would heve been quicker if I had found the missing capacitor before I started, it would have been less frustrating if I had more accuracy in soldering a couple of the larger items, the power input and the potentiometers which had a direct effect on assembling the case, but it was done, and I was happy.

It has been a good week, the eureka moment with the Bitscope and the success in the waveform kit.