zachtheterrible
Active Member
I have ordered the parts to make my ultrabright LED flashlight, and most of the parts are SMT. I had no prior experience with SMT until yesterday when I whipped out an evaluation or practice board that came with a bunch of SMT stuff. I got it for free from someone in the electronics industry, i love having connections :lol:
Anyway, I'm not sure if I'm doing it right.
For capcitors, resistors, anything in the little rectangle packages, this is how I do it: I hold the piece in place with tweezers and put my solder tip with a bunch of solder on it up to one side of the package and let it adhere to the board and component, then do the same to the other side. It seems to work very nicely.
For ICs: I take my solder flux pen (also a freebie :lol: ) and "draw" over all of the solder pads. Then I hold the IC in place with tweezers and drag my iron loaded with solder over all of the pins. If there is any bridges, I take and clean 'em up with solder wick. This also seems to come out very nicely.
In my evaluation kit I had some kind of graphics processor with 120+ pins. I used the process decribed above to solder the thing in and it came out pretty well, apart from it's probably being fried because I took too long on it.
A few questions:
1. Just how much heat can those tiny little things absorb and not be destroyed? With through-hole components, youve got the leads which act as sort of a heatsink, and whever you solder it in, the soldering iron is not right next to the component.
2. Do I really need to tin my boards before I solder things in? I think that tinning is just so that the board doesn't oxidize. If I make the board right away and solder everything, then it won't have a chance to oxidize. My evaluation board was pre-tinned, and I'm not sure how much of a difference that made.
I looked for tutorials on SMD on google, and there is a surprising lack of them. Thanks for the help :lol:
Anyway, I'm not sure if I'm doing it right.
For capcitors, resistors, anything in the little rectangle packages, this is how I do it: I hold the piece in place with tweezers and put my solder tip with a bunch of solder on it up to one side of the package and let it adhere to the board and component, then do the same to the other side. It seems to work very nicely.
For ICs: I take my solder flux pen (also a freebie :lol: ) and "draw" over all of the solder pads. Then I hold the IC in place with tweezers and drag my iron loaded with solder over all of the pins. If there is any bridges, I take and clean 'em up with solder wick. This also seems to come out very nicely.
In my evaluation kit I had some kind of graphics processor with 120+ pins. I used the process decribed above to solder the thing in and it came out pretty well, apart from it's probably being fried because I took too long on it.
A few questions:
1. Just how much heat can those tiny little things absorb and not be destroyed? With through-hole components, youve got the leads which act as sort of a heatsink, and whever you solder it in, the soldering iron is not right next to the component.
2. Do I really need to tin my boards before I solder things in? I think that tinning is just so that the board doesn't oxidize. If I make the board right away and solder everything, then it won't have a chance to oxidize. My evaluation board was pre-tinned, and I'm not sure how much of a difference that made.
I looked for tutorials on SMD on google, and there is a surprising lack of them. Thanks for the help :lol: