4 ms·
It's been a little while since I did proto boards, but I remember a vast chasm between industrial & hobbyist, that basically forced me to wrangle packages I had
by st26 8y ago
It's been a little while since I did proto boards, but I remember a vast chasm between industrial & hobbyist, that basically forced me to wrangle packages I had no desire to deal with. You could get 4GB DDR2 DIMMs, or you could get a DIP 8kB SRAM. For a microchip you could get TQFP-32, or BGA-1000. So on and so forth. I remember a useful chip that came in nothing but QFN-16.
It seemed like it wasn't I need fancy gear to make blinky lights, but rather for anything better than 8-bit, kilobyte, and low MHz, the only parts available was the fancy commercial stuff.
- Taniwha 8y agoSMT soldering is seriously easy, I teach it to kids - people are just too scared by it - I've done small BGAs - hot air reflow, a fine tipped iron, and if you have old eyes like mine a stereo microscope are all you need. I do occasionally do small (100+ pins) BGAs - for that I get a steel solder stencil made and use solder paste and a cheap Chinese reflow oven
- slededit 8y agoI'm trying really hard to communicate that you can use these parts pretty easily. Just get a stencil made with your PCB it's another $40. Add in a toaster oven, some solder paste and tweezers and your all set. Once you see how easy it is to reflow a board you won't want to bother with hand soldering DIP packages anyway.