another breadboard

Very pretty, but too shiny for lead-free solder - don't you realise you're dicing with death?

Is that decoupling capacitor above the 'IN' connector soldered on its southerly pad? Probably just the angle, but looks like it's not wetted.

Cheers

--
Syd

me hides my latest prototype.

NT

You really need to use die-cut double sticky tape, though...those ragged cuts spoil the whole effect. ;)

(Nice proto.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

Too late for me. I've been soldering since I was three years old, and using axial resistors for toothpicks. [1]

It's OK; I checked them all. Optical illusion.

[1] one place I worked, one of the guys always chewed on parts. So someone left him a charged capacitor.

Yeah, I need a better technique there. The super-glue that holds the copper islands down is kinda ugly, too.

I'm getting low on the gold-plated FR4, so I need to order some more, maybe a couple of square feet, at $100 per.

Yeah, me too. Never did me any biscuit fishcake shoepolish.

Cheers

--
Syd

Could you possibly solder them? put a piece of rosin-core solder under the double-sided laminate and a quick hit with a huge metalworking soldering iron?

Might work. Or maybe a bit of solder paste and a heat gun.

Or epoxy? The super-glue kind of makes a mess that's hard to clean up.

You just need a dab of cyanoacrylate to hold the supply busbars down till you get the bypass caps installed. After that they won't go anywhere.

The good thing about that approach is that you can move them if you need to--cyanoacrylate comes off very easily compared with epoxy.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Wow. Did the client send in a helicopter and a barrel of Beluga caviar or how did they pry you out of Truckee?

Indeed. Mine often look a bit more ragged.

Why do you use gold-plated? Even at several gigeehoitzes I found the RF performance not to be that different on such small stuff.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

just for the looks, it doesn't oxidize

-Lasse

IIRC, it's pretty and solders really well. But, mostly pretty.

This is a guy who was responsible for our getting a lot of business. He is weird, sometimes demanding, but I can't say no to him. I've built him all sorts of weird filters and timing things, mostly hand-built but some PCBs, all free.

The helicopter is a nice idea. It took us over 5 hours to drive back on Sunday afternoon. We had a passenger, so we split the driving three ways.

It doesn't tarnish like copper. The copper breadboards look great at first, but in a couple of weeks they are all tarnished and grungy with visible fingerprints and such. The gold stays beautiful.

I solder them - Solder a handle onto the square of FR4, then melt blob of solder on each surface to be attached (pad of FR4 and ground plane) simultaneously with the iron between them, then quickly pull out the iron and push down the pad of FR4. If the squares of FR4 are very small (

It might not be suitable for your breadboards, and I doubt it will hold up anywhere near as long as a noble-metal plating, but I've grown fond of using an electroless silver surface treatment for the small PC boards I make.

The resulting silver layer is very thin, but it's sufficient to prevent copper tarnishing, and it's extremely easy to solder. I etched a few small boards about a month ago, to make a pair of RF return loss bridges, and when I soldered them up yesterday they looked just as good as the day I made 'em - no discoloration at all.