It's almost Halloween, with Christmas just around the corner. So what does that mean?

BLINKY LIGHTS!

Except when I was taking out a few decorations for halloween, I found that a small battery operated set of lights had broken.

One of the wires came disconnected.

It couldn't possibly have anything to do with them doing such a shitty job on soldering it...or using such shitty wire...

Lets just resolder it together though, because we don't throw this shit away! It's become so common for people to just throw shit away. But, even when it's just a cheap piece of shit, you shouldn't throw it away if you can easily fix it. Even if it's not so easy to fix, you should still fix it if you can!

And of course the wire broke off when I tried to strip it...

The wire was so shitty I couldn't even strip it with it disconnected from the blobby board. So I cut off a piece of scrap wire from a wiring harness that I scrapped from some random piece of electronics, to reattach to the board.

Here you can see my shitty wire strippers. I'm sure I have some nicer ones somewhere, but they work for now. I wanna get some nicer ones, but it's not a priority.

And it's reattached!

I dunno if I did that great of a job reattaching it, and cleaning up some of the solder points just a bit, but it works, and it's slightly better than it was.

Now rather than throwing something away, I have some extra blinky lights to put around the house for the holidays.

Please upvote if you wanna support my continual efforts to get more into electronics. This might not have been an awesome post about something cool to learn about in electronics, but repairing electronics, even when it's something incredibly simple, is so important! A soldering iron is only a few bucks, and you CAN learn to fix little issues like this with things, if nothing else. What happens when it's something expensive? Will you pay $50 for some idiot to solder it, or will you do it yourself, save some money, and learn something?

It's important to keep things out of land fills and not waste money when you don't have to. It might take some time, but it's not wasted, because it helps you to grow in skills, which is always important!