cyb0rg777 said:
You must work in the industry Evandude because having both dip chips for prototyping and smd chips for building boards is quite an inventory.
no, I've just been a hobbyist for many years and the parts build up. I'm sure everyone here who's been doing this for very long has an impressive parts bin as well. I also try deliberately to keep the SMD versions of many common parts on hand for several reasons: A) they're usually cheaper, B) they're smaller, thus making final boards smaller, C) they're easier to store, I can fit thousands of each part in tiny plastic flip-top containers, and D) they're faster and easier to solder.
I have a radioshack pcb kit in my cabinet somewhere but I only tried a few boards.In both cases the traces came out "fugly" .Some of them where not useable.
Well yes, if you rely on a rat shack kit to make your PCB's, they are going to come out pretty bad. PCB fabrication is NOT that hard and can give you very good results quite easily if you use the right methods. Toner transfer or UV exposure both make good homemade boards and aren't ridiculously complicated. Drawing the traces with a permanent marker or using the rub-on traces (whatever radio shack has you do) is never going to be as good.
This is a board I made with toner transfer:
**broken link removed**
and I can fabricate a board in an hour or two once it's designed, which is enough that I can still do an entire project in an afternoon if I feel so inclined.
The chip makes sense to me. A big USB to serial converter lowers the coolness factor.
Sure, I can see that it would be handy if they had lower pin count, since most people won't be using most of the features. On the other hand, once you actually do etch PCB's for SMD chips, it's not any harder to etch a board for a chip with 48 pins than it is to etch one with fewer pins, and for those that don't etch PCBs, there's not much reason that you can't just use serial directly. If you're not making PCB's, and just using it for breadboard prototyping, why do you care so much whether you run a serial cable to the board or a USB cable?