Amateur electronics in danger due to lack of DIP ICs

I start with a whiteboard layout. I sometimes carve it totally freehand, and sometimes use a ruler to draw lines with a sharpie pen, and use them to guide the Dremel cutter, still manual cutting. I've had a lot of practice.

Lines that are locally rough but long-term straight look pretty good. I use a carbide dental burr and work under my Mantis. It's actually fun, sort of a kind of folk art.

We recently got a fiber laser, to engrave artwork into anodized aluminum. It can blast the copper off FR4 too, so we might use that for fine-pitch stuff too small to Dremel.

Sounds complex. I just use a soldering iron.

Me too. With maybe a hotplate underneath the board if the part has a power pad. The mortality rate with just hot air is too high.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Phil Hobbs wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@electrooptical.net:

There are devices which support the board over a hot air underside pre-heat and then a hot air gun reflows the top side component and performs the solder operation. They are pretty good for small PCB assemblies.

My Leister has a frigging different nozzle for each package type, effectively. So, the heat flows where it should and not where it shouldn't.

But, you can fry a device with hot air just like you can fry one with an iron -- if you don't know what you're doing!

Hence, it's far easier for me to let a line that is set up to do this sort of stuff -- day in, day out -- deal with the hassles.

That's me. Agent opens the reply at the top so that's where I write. Don't you enjoy not having to scroll through hundreds of lines of quotes which should have been snipped?

John

You will miss interspersed replies with top posting.

There are only a few people here who never snip, so you already know what you are getting yourself into when you open their post.

I do :)

There is relatively little "pure electronics" nowadays.

Mostly I see people clagging boards together, usually with a small amount of software, with laser-cut mechanical bits.

But most of the people that used to fiddle with electronics at a component level now fiddle with software at analogous levels - and that has no place in maker clubs.

I visit them very rarely, but it is roughly the same here. They prefer 3D printing, though. Electronics == connecting modules from AliExpress and programming them. Could have been worse.

Best regards, Piotr

Yes; I forgot low resolution 3D printing, and some CNC work.

No.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Not at all. I scroll through the whole message in case I need to intersperce comments within it.

I never even look at the address line. Anyone who chronically fails to trim goes into my killfile.

John

You'd be surprised. The board-stuff house I use had enough of a backlog that I'm going to have to find another one. True many people start off with an Ardunio board as a base but then they make custom piggyback boards.

I like the processor on the Arduino but I can't justify that large a form factor for small projects so I design around the chip itself.

The Atmel B*stards discontinued the processor I used on the Roy induction heater product so I'm not too inclined to design anything new around an Atmel chip. TI has a really nice line of 60 MHz RISC chips and they are available on what they call Rocket Boards. Similar philosophy to the Ardunio model with many expansion boards. Their development system is vastly superior to Atmel Studio and they offer a Linux version.

John

I've no reason to doubt you, but my point stands.

Personally when programming I like to either be using bare silicon or a full PC. Things in the middle are complicated without being interesting.

The next boards (where I don't need hard realtime guarantees) will probably be RPi Pico.

Just curious about which TI processor architecture you're talking about. I figure you mean the launchpad series of eval boards, which support several different processors. I've been working with the C2000 architecture for 1

-Jim

Dial 0x911 for the Usenet Police.

We've done some nice projects with microZed, and my next one will use a picoZed. Both have a Zynq with all the trimmings.

PicoZed will fit as a component on a single-wide 6U eurocard.

Why not snip them then?

Jeroen Belleman