4 ms·
It's not psychological. You're completely ignoring the cost of equipment. SMD only is a huge no-go for someone at the lower bracket of income. The cost of a p
by JAlexoid 6y ago
It's not psychological. You're completely ignoring the cost of equipment.
SMD only is a huge no-go for someone at the lower bracket of income.
The cost of a perfboard, with a cheap soldering iron and components is a fraction of any kind of equipment you need to create a circuit board from scratch.
I built voltage regulators for my electronics projects, because a regulated lab supply was completely out of financial reach. I couldn't have done it with a breadboard - I needed a permanent fixed board. I couldn't have done it with a copper laminate and etcher - because I couldn't afford $10 for the etch or a $40 dremel drill for the holes.
I didn't have a programmer and I had to reuse the RS232 chips to program ATTiny2313.
If people like you had their way, I would have probably been a barista...
- numpad0 6y agoChinese iPhone repair guys are hand soldering SMDs all the time, you can definitely solder SMDs on THT perfs or get SMD perfs. It's more of the matters of your motor skills and perhaps whether you have a good video microscope if it gets really small.
- rhn_mk1 6y agoSure, but that doesn't make it easy, which was the point.
- JAlexoid 6y ago1. That's racist. 2. They make money off it - thus higher value equipment. Definitely not a $10 soldering iron. 3. Building from scratch is about 100x easier and less error prone with through hole construction, than SMD. Soldering onto an existing PCB is not an issue at all here. 4. When you can't afford to scrap a $4 MCU, because you overheated it with your $5 soldering iron - DIP package can be mounted into a special socket. SMD - cannot.
- numpad0 6y ago1) I said Chinese because not many people with other nationalities do PCB repairs on iPhone. People who aren’t trained by Chinese repair ... artists? are exceptionally rare. 2) 3) https://hackaday.com/2016/10/10/ne555s-smd-prototyping-is-a-work-of-art/ https://hackaday.com/2016/10/10/ne555s-smd-prototyping-is-a-... https://twitter.com/idzuna_tan/status/741895788469485569 https://twitter.com/idzuna_tan/status/741895788469485569 https://mitxela.com/projects/soldering_msop https://mitxela.com/projects/soldering_msop 4) https://www.adafruit.com/product/1280 https://www.adafruit.com/product/1280 0.65mm is def doable, 0602 caps are hard, below or BGA needs microscope but only from there you need proper equipments
- JAlexoid 6y agoYou just linked me to a $49 part... Are you on a mission to prove that you're completely incapable of understanding that that is an insurmountable amount of money for billions of people? As for your racism - OH BOY!.. (eyeroll)
- mNovak 6y agoBack in college, I etched my own PCBs in tupperware with muratic acid, with Sharpie marker as the mask. Nowadays I buy $2 (for 5) PCBs from china. Equipment-wise, you can reflow SMDs quite well on a frying pan.
- JAlexoid 6y agoYeah.... I reused most of my $1.50 perfboards 2-10 times. Reusing expensive components, such as $4 MCUs and not frying them in a literal frying pan - is critical. A DIP socket literally made it possible for me to do MCU programming with my $5 soldering iron, that would normally fry an MCU. Nowadays I buy prefabed modules and uSBCs for $30 each and throw them out - not as my main job as well.. Yet I know really well what access to start in the engineering field means for people whose budgets are $80 per month on food and clothes.