My First Solder Attempt

So a couple weekends ago I finally got around to trying out the soldering iron that I was borrowing from Levi at work. He let me borrow his Radio Shack Mini Butane Gas-Powered Iron. It was okay, but I decided to just get one that you plug in to the wall so that I don't have to deal with refilling it. Also the gas powered soldering iron seemed to have a lot of heat coming out of the sides which caused it to start to burn the board I was working on.

So anyways, I put together the little "power supply" that I had previously taking up one side of my bread board. The design I got from the Beginning Embedded Electronics tutorial on SparkFun. My ultimate goal has been to hook up the ATMega168 chip that I have to some kind of output device (such as the 20 character x 4 line LCD character display I bought) and then add in some kind of input also eventaully to make an interactive device of some kind. 

After I got my power supply working the next thing I soldered was a bunch of wires into the actual LCD display so that I could connect it to the microprocessor on the bread board. Next step program the chip to control the LCD.