Solder Lore

How it works

About Solder Lore

YouTube's own recommendations optimise for watch time. Solder Lore does something older and slower: it counts how often people in hobby and professional electronics, microcontrollers, PCB design, repair, test equipment, making communities have pointed each other at a video, unprompted, in answer to a real question.

The rule

A video is listed only if at least 3 different people recommended it, in at least 3 different months. One enthusiast posting the same link ten times counts once. A link that went round for a week and vanished does not qualify. What survives is the stuff people kept coming back to for years.

Where the recommendations come from

Stack Exchange: 3dprinting.stackexchange.com, arduino.stackexchange.com, electronics.stackexchange.com, raspberrypi.stackexchange.com. Questions, answers and comments are published under Creative Commons BY-SA, so short quotes appear on video pages with the author's name and a link back. Reddit: r/AskElectronics, r/ElectricalEngineering, r/PrintedCircuitBoard, r/arduino, r/diyelectronics, r/electronics, r/embedded, r/esp32, r/raspberry_pi. Reddit threads are used as a signal only. No comment text from Reddit is republished here; a video page simply notes which subreddits recommended it.

The data was last rebuilt on 2026-11-04. It covers 6,220 link mentions and 921 videos passed the rule.

Which years are covered

Stack Exchange sites are read in full from their public data dumps. Reddit is read newest first: recent recommendations are the most useful, so the site launched on the latest period and earlier years are added as they are processed. Where a subreddit shows more than one period, the stretch between them has not been read yet.

The ranking

Videos are ordered by distinct months first, then distinct people, then the number of communities, then by how strongly the recommendations were worded. A "hidden gem" is a video recommended with unusual enthusiasm by fewer people than the famous ones. "Contested" marks a video where some recommendations came with caveats.

The descriptions

The one-line summary on each video page was written from the recommendation threads, not from the video's own description, and says why people recommend it and who it suits. It is a summary of what the community said, checked for sense but not a review by us. Treat it as a pointer, not a verdict.

Videos and creators

Every video plays in YouTube's own embedded player, with YouTube's own controls and any ads the creator has chosen. Nothing is downloaded, rehosted or altered. Titles and thumbnails are shown as YouTube provides them and are refreshed monthly. If you are a creator and want a video removed from this list, use the contact details on the privacy page.