I have been making quite a few DIYLODs, which started off looking extremely crude but slowly got better as I got more experienced with the soldering iron. I have encountered tons of problems along the way, some of which I have fixed and some which I have yet to, which I will be asking about. Most of the problems pertain to stress relief. When the LOD is used extensively and in a portable environment, what tends to happen is that the wire sticking out gets bent from side to side and contorted in a whole bunch of different sorts of positions, which leads to one of two effects; either the pin in the LOD breaks which severs the connection, or the pins get pulled out of the sockets that they are in which makes the connection very intermittent due to improper contact with the iPod jack. Whenever the wire is bent, the attached pins will get pulled backwards which results in the above problem. Have tried using hot glue as a stress relief, which works to a certain extent but not always as it doesn't completely restrict movement (unless I completely fill the entire LOD with it so that there's no space to move at all, have been considering that but it would make troubleshooting a nightmare should I somehow have to) And lastly, is there any advantage to soldering the ground wire to the 2nd pin instead of just simply soldering it to the 11-15 shorted pins, which are ground connections in themselves? It makes things a lot easier cos you have more space to work with. Any help and suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thanks! (:
