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Project Notes

#171 SMD Practice Boards

A collection of notes, kits and resources for hand-soldering surface mount devices

Notes

Through-hole and DIP components have historically made it really easy for the electronics hobbyist to hand-solder a project together.

These days it’s getting harder to avoid surface mount components due to

  • availability or cost of through-hole/DIP packages
  • or that some newer components may only be available in surface mount packages

One effective solution is to use a “module” if one is available. These are generally small boards holding surface mount chip(s) and supporting circuitry but provide pins or sockets for easy external connections. Although mainly geared for microcontroller market, there are many that are also relevant for standalone analog or digital circuits. An example is this CurrentSensorModule.

However as I’ve found, surface-mount devices can be quite easy to use in a hobby project even in the absence of a suitable module. The challenge kind of breaks down into two categories:

  • larger pitch SMDs which can quite easily be soldered with traditional techniques
  • small pitch SMD packages that generally require drag or reflow soldering techniques
    • e.g TSSOP/TQFP packages with a pitch of 0.80 or lower
    • magnifier and lots of flux! .. pretty much essential
    • I haven’t quite mastered this yet ;-(

Surface Mount Nomenclature

SMD Practice Kits

To get started, there is a large range of cheap practice boards available. I’ve tried quite a few, which I’ll present below.

Basic SMD Practice Board

See LEAP#808 Basic SMD Practice Board.

An example of a basic practice board with 0603, 0805, 1206, SOT-23 and SOP-16 components.

BasicKit1_build

Ring Counter Practice Kit

See LEAP#809 Basic SMD Practice Board.

A full-featured soldering practice board with a wide range of components from 0402 to 1206 and SOP-8/16. It includes a classic 4017/555 ring counter test circuit.

RingCounterKit1_build

Glowing Star SMD Practice Board

See LEAP#620 Glowing Star SMD Practice Board.

A five-pointed star SMD Practice Board with LM358 oscillator LED effects.

Star_build

LED Matrix SMD Practice Board

See LEAP#810 LED Matrix SMD Practice Board.

A full-featured soldering practice board with a range of components (0603 , 0805, SO-8, SO-16) and a 64-LED matrix that displays a microcontroller-generated pattern when soldered correctly.

LedMatrixKit1_build

Credits and References

About LEAP#171 SMDPractice BoardKit

This page is a web-friendly rendering of my project notes shared in the LEAP GitHub repository.

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About LEAP

LEAP is my personal collection of electronics projects - usually involving an Arduino or other microprocessor in one way or another. Some are full-blown projects, while many are trivial breadboard experiments, intended to learn and explore something interesting.

Projects are often inspired by things found wild on the net, or ideas from the many great electronics podcasts and YouTube channels. Feel free to borrow liberally, and if you spot any issues do let me know or send a pull-request.

NOTE: For a while I included various scale modelling projects here too, but I've now split them off into a new repository: check out LittleModelArt if you are looking for these projects.

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