Here’s a graphical app note from TDK on the phenomenological “tombstone” when doing reflow soldering. If temperature and solder quantity is inappropriate during substrate mounting, products may not be mounted properly, which causes tombstone
Tag Archives: soldering
App note: Rework method for surface mount MLCCs
Things you might need to know about doing SMT rework on Multi Layered Ceramic Capacitors (MLCC). An application guide from TDK Rework is necessary when surface mount (SMT) components become misaligned or improperly mounted. This paper will answer questions concerning rework of SMT capacitors. Specifically, equipment, procedures, and technique are covered.
PCB a Week 18: SMD Practice Skull
Mats continues his challenge of designing one PCB every week. In week 18 he came up with SMD Practice Skull: I while ago I chatted with (Re:load) Nick Johnson about making some simple pcbs for learning how to solder smd parts. This is one of the boards that I came up with. All parts are […]
Homebrew SMT stencil
Andre shares this short article on how to make homebrew solder paste stencils from 0.1mm brass plates. Via the contact form.
Soldering 8AWG wire with lead free
jwhitley89 tweeted: “And this is how you solder 8 AWG wire with lead free”
WORKSHOP VIDEO #59: 946A+ solder reflow hot plate
This week we take a look at the 946A+ solder reflow hot plate from our last Shenzhen equipment haul. There’s a ton of no-name 946A+ out there, ours happens to be D-GOLD. They’re all pretty similar, and run about $50 in Shenzhen. Using a kitchen hot plate is a common hack for DIY reflow soldering, […]
Tips on QFP breakout board soldering
Joe Desbonnet writes in with two tips he learned when using the DP QFP breakout board. Via the contact form.
Fine pitch BGA deadbug soldering
Xevel shows us how to solder fine pitch BGA dead-bug: After seeing a few posts about “deadbugging” (soldering wires to the leads or pads of a component instead of soldering it on its recommended footprint) of BGA chips on Dangerous Prototypes, some with “big” solder balls, and some with smaller ones, I thought I would […]
Preheating plate + tinfoil = almost reflow
Andrew Tergis presents an interesting method of reflowing SMD components using a preheating plate and tinfoil (to catch infrared energy). He also uses a Fluke temperature probe attached to the PCB to more accurately monitor temperature. This gives newcomers to reflow an idea of the pitfalls involved. Vladimir via the contact form.
Who says BGA packages are hard to solder
Here is proof that soldering BGA’s is not that hard. Check out this Mandelbrot zoom fractal engine with a PSP display project (machine translation). The FPGA in a ball grid array package is soldered dead bug style. Now that’s skill. Via the forum, and Hack a Day.
Soldering iron tip holder
Alex designed this soldering iron tip holder. It’s an aluminum bar bended into shape, with holes for the tips drilled into it. As basic as it is, it’s both functional, and good looking. After everything was said and done, it took about an hour to get it made and on my desk. Not bad for […]
Through-hole soldering tutorial and iron maintenance
Proper soldering iron maintenance and soldering techniques required to get a perfect solder joint every time. Via PCBheaven.
Slinging solder today
5 more new prototypes on the bench. First the big chips then the little stuff.
MMA7455L soldering explained
In our previous Workshop Video we mentioned we asked Pietja to solder up those pesky MMA7455L accelerometers. Here is how he got around to doing it. Check out the pics and his instructions below. Ian asked me to solder some MMA7455L on the USB POV Toy boards. So when I got them the first thing […]
Robots’ extreme soldering
From IRC we bring you some pics of Robots’ mad soldering skills. This QFN chip is dead-bugged onto the back of another chip. Below there’s another QFN chip broken out with wire. Please send in your pics of extreme soldering via the contact form.
Workshop Video #10: BGA revisited
In an earlier Workshop Video we challenged Sjaak to solder a TMP006 non-contact temperature sensor in a BGA package. We lacked the skills to make it happen, but this week DP engineer Jer shows how he successfully soldered 2 of 4 breakout boards. Jer doesn’t hold the the chip in place with kapton tape like […]
Yet another SMD soldering video tutorial
Here’s another SMD soldering video tutorial. It features the use of 4 different flux types: pen, liquid, gel, and syringe. The video starts with soldering a 0603 chip resistor and moves up to a 208pin 0.5mm pitch QFP IC. Via the comments.
App note: Guidelines for soldering QFN lead-less packages
This app note from Texas Instruments covers the basic guidelines on how to solder QFN and SON lead-less package. It includes some PCB design, solder paste screen printing, assembly, and reflow guidelines. Quad flatpack no leads (QFNs) and small-outline no leads (SONs) are leadless packages with electrical connections made via lands on the bottom side […]
Hand soldering a BGA using the SchmartBoard|ez
Ball Grid Array chips have multiple rows of contacts under the chip. These are difficult to solder by hand, as we found out when Sjaak tried to solder a TMP006. Zeta tipped us to this video of hand soldering a 400 pin BGA chip to a SchmartBoard breakout. The breakout board has a via under […]
PSoC3 system on chip dev-board: SSOP IC soldered
Kartik soldered the first prototype of his PSoC3 development board. He used a no-solder soldering technique to solder the SSOP IC. He had great success with this technique, after destroying a few PCBs with his old method. Things didnt go that well on the first board I tried out,mainly due to me using the wrong […]