4 ms·

Thanks! Yeah that's a tradeoff that I've been struggling with. I still think there's a lot of additional learning potential with through-hole components you can

Thanks! Yeah that's a tradeoff that I've been struggling with. I still think there's a lot of additional learning potential with through-hole components you can breadboard, though you do sacrifice board space, availability of components, and sometimes cost by sticking to through-hole parts. Since the electronics for this project are simple enough I've ended up leaning towards a through-hole board to pair with an Arduino, but I'll admit that I haven't kept up with the cost of small orders of fully-assembled PCBs these days.

throwanem 10y ago
To just throw out a counterexample, this is exactly the kind of project I'd prefer to build with through-hole components, rather than buying a preassembled PCB with SMT parts. On the one hand, I actually enjoy soldering, which I freely concede is bizarre; on the other, through-hole parts can actually be worked with by hand, so that if, for example, I want to replace a resistor with a trimpot or a digital pot in order to play around with flip speed or the like, I can totally do that. If I were going to turn this into a product-shaped product, I'd probably turn it into three: a bare PCB with a BOM for the buyer to fill, a prestuffed SMT PCB for people who just want to assemble the display and run it, and in between a PCB with a bag full of parts, for those who want what I guess would be a reasonably high-end-beginner-to-low-end-intermediate assembly project without a lot of hassle. But that's just me! Opinions vary, and mine's worth exactly what you paid for it. This is a super neat project, though, however it ends up!