Well I decided to try my hand at reflow soldering a SMT board in my kitchen oven to save the tooling cost of running small prototype runs through my contract MFR.
I had to prototype up on a real SMT PCB because some of the parts were only available in SMT, and just tooooo small to breadboard by hand. I am using several tiny x4 resistor arrays, one class D audio amp chip that's about the size of a wood tick who hasn't been eating well, and other similar nanoness.
Long story short.. my first attempt to hand apply the solder paste was sloppy, and I did get a bunch of solder bridges, but a little solder wick cleaned that up... I even placed some of the bicolor LEDs wrong so had to remove and reinstall, but after working with SMT for a while the 1206 LEDs look huge by comparison...If someone was more serious about this than me, and doing several PCBs at once, you can buy solder paste stencils pretty inexpensively ($100?).
One PIA with SMT is if you drop a part, forget about finding it... Today i was changing out one of the x4 resistor arrays to a different value and the new part popped out of the tape carrier, never to be seen again.
But the good news is I have the PCB fired up and fully functional, so I can now proceed with tweaking out the filter values and dialing in the design...
Not bad for 61 YO eyeballs... (assisted by magnifiers on top of reading glasses)...
JR
SMT not so scary after all... you can try this at home
SMT not so scary after all... you can try this at home
Cancel the "cancel culture", do not support mob hatred.