SMT to DIP Adapters - WITH SOCKETS ???

Which prototype chip/board do you want?

Flux is your friend, as are decent (temperature-controlled) soldering irons. (E.g., the orange-base Wellers are kinda junky, the blue-based ones are good... or you can get a used Metcal for not much more than the price of a new Weller.)

There are sockets for SMT chips, but they're quite expensive (almost always exceeding the price of the chip itself); I think that's why you don't see too many. I have seen some such adapters for large BGA parts where they figure you're using, e.g., a $600 FPGA so a $500 adapter is probably not a big deal...

---Joel

Also... not exactly what you asked for, but these might make it a little easier:

The ones that I am familiar with are intended as adapters for device programmers or prototyping. Very handy but relatively expensive (and large).

Some examples at

You used to be able to get them but lead pitches are so fine these days that it's hard to make a socket for some.

Try..

Expect $100 for some types.

That's the way the world is going. It's great for board density, and for speed, and for semi- or fully-automated assembly.

I was just prototyping some smt stuff. An 0805, or an SO-8, looks huge to me now. I used to be intimidated by a 1206.

Clamshell sockets for surface-mount parts are huge and *very* expensive... hundreds of dollars each. And most of them are... wait for it... surface mount!

Too expensive.

The Beldyn adapters are nice:

ftp://66.117.156.8/NE3509M04.JPG

Don't give up. Get a good soldering iron and some good lighting and magnifiers, and some tweezers and such, and relax and practice. It's not that bad. Some people gave up electronics when transistors were invented.

John

...

Why not make one? Take a plated board, etch the lead pattern on it. Then take a piece of unplated board and cut a precise hole that confines the chip's leads such that each lead lines up with a trace; then make another part that clamps down over that, pressing the leads against the traces. If the hole in the upper board is the right size, then you could just drop the chip in and it would get aligned by the edges of the hole in the upper board.

Of course, this will take some time - if you're being paid by the hour, it'd be cheaper to hire some undergrad to just solder the chip in for you. ;-)

Good Luck! Rich

I'm in the same boat. Just don't think 37 gauge wire is real these days. Back in my youth . . . that was the size of continents. (Now I understand my dad - building that first induction coil he couldn't see the 30 gauge)

I need a very fine gauge iron and can make connections with a magnifying glass - not too much problem there. Brace my hand on lead weight etc..

The problem I have is trying to get the sm stuff on a real BREADboard that I can see with unaided vision. How does one get from the little bity parts to real (24 gauge) wires on a real breadboard with 0.100 spacing?

I do have a somewhat solution - line a bunch of wires into a homemade jig, apply hot melt glue to the wires and I have a sort of connector (and they only work once or find themselves wall art) assuming the reflow soldering works and I don't break a wire.

Reflow - some plumber's joint tape and a soldering iron.

Traces? How about bread boarding? How to get the surface mount to work with "real parts" (those visible to the naked eye with 20/20 vision)

For SMT parts that I need to use on a breadboard, I usually etch a small PCB to hold them. I reflow the parts onto the pcb, then solder in the wire "pins". You can see a sample here:

Maybe *I'm* weird, but I prefer surface mount. I just made a board with almost 300 components and assembled it by hand. Besides some connectors and RA mount stuff on the edge there's only one through- hole component I can think of (LM34).

I hate building through-hole boards (mostly kits). If you stuff too many parts the leads get crazy to trim, some parts always pop up from the board while you're soldering them, the resulting board is unfriendly to the fingers (not as bad as press fit!).

It does help to do some SMT work under a good stereo scope just to get a feel for what's going on. You don't necessarily need to see it happen every time.

The funny thing is that I think chips are easier to solder than discretes. The smaller the resistor/cap, the more they want to stand up when you tack one end. And it seems like the second end always has a tendancy to get a bit blobby. With big chips you just use lots of flux and the solder knows what to do. I've done several 0.5mm QFP (a few with no soldermask due to my own mistake with the apertures) and never even had a shorted pin. Bent them, yes (urrrgh)

More than a hundred dollars? I think that's what you're looking at. Also, they're huge (tall and wide) because they include parts akin to medieval torture devices to clamp the chip down. Seems to me some of them are SMT, too.

As people say, they're expensive. But if you want to look:

Ex:

Robert H.

I thought like that up until a year ago until I bit the bullet an sat down and made my first SMD board. SO8/0805/SOT-23. I used a temperature-controlled Weller with a fine tip, PbSnAg solder and occasionally liquid flux to be applied with a fine brush. The board was made in a board house and luckily gold-plated (they just throw the prototypes into their batch pool, you never know what surface finish you get).

At first I was intimidated, but after a few parts I knew I would never want to go back to TPH. Assembly is a lot faster than TPH because you don't need to bend and clip leads.

Given the right tools even rework is much easier than on TPH. I got the cheapest solering tweezers I could find, a rather clumsy Weller model that plugs into their standard electronic temperature controllers. It takes five seconds to remove a SO16 chip (but several minutes to fit and align the proper tweezer tips and to heat up the iron ;-)

Try it, you'll love it. I've never tried this on homemade boards, but if you do make sure to tin the pads really well before assembly. And use extra flux if you reflow connections.

And practise. I ripped the controller board out of a dead hard drive, baked it in the oven at 210 deg C for a while an then gave it a single, hard rap onto the tabletop. 99% of components flew right off, yielding hours worth of free practice components and a PCB. (even if you abhor SMD assembly, this is fun BTW.)

There are people who say that 0.5mm pitch components are easy to solder by hand. After trying it with the controller chip on said harddisk PCB I can't conirm that, but the leads of the chip were slightly bent and unevenly tinned. Maybe with a new chip and PCB it is easier.

Good luck!

robert

I designed a similar board for SOT-23 and the like, with DIP-8 pins. Used some high-temp board and they are rather useful. Do not know how to sell it, so am stuck with thousands of those press-mount pins...

DIP-8 pins.

those

are those the pins that you press onto the side of a standard PCB (where there is a pad or trace contact) to give the PCB a DIP like appendage/appearance ? and are they the solderable type ?

i have been searching to purchase some of those but can not find a source that sells them in small lots (ie. 500) ? i have found rolls (15-25 thousand) ....

if you are looking to rid yourself of some of that excess inventory then do you sell on th-e-bay ?

robb

Wow ... you weren't kidding about them being *expensive* !

I've tried it ... I didn't love it. Of course now I've got a colletction of ground-down Weller iron tips that may be good for something sometime.

Yesterday I went out and bought the RadioShack de-soldering dohickey that's supposed to be stuffed with metal wool and attached to an aquarium pump to create a hot-air 'iron'. I'll see how that goes.

SMT really IS for robots. Admittedly the *necessary* size of ICs and such is now very tiny - and this lets manufacturers make really tiny devices like iPods and such. Thing is, it really makes it hard for those of us who hand build prototypes and low-volume stuff.

Maybe I should build a chip-handling robot ... XYZ mechanism with a teeny-tiny 'spot-welder' that bonds the chip to a pre-coated PCB ... ?

I once had to ask a technician (Hi Terry) if he could remove a 160 pin TQFP with hand tools and save both the board and the device. I can't recall the lead pitch but it was hard to see the gaps between leads with the naked eye. He said he would try and he managed it.

These pins press fit into an 0.026 hole; MillMax 3154-0-00-15-00-00-03. One source charged me $0.62 each for 2000 and another source charged me $0.30 each for 15,000. What if i just sent you the 2,000 bag (less about 140) for the Halibut (fishy reasons) no charge? That way a certain somebody will not have a hissy-fit about this not being a market place (wheer fish could be found).