I have had unsteady hands all of my life; mild “essential tremor”. I am 68. When SMT was introduced, I was intimidated by it. But nowadays I can hand solder chips routinely. One recommendation is that I like to use a relatively small footprint for my chips.This provides more room on the pad for the soldering iron tip.
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’s? No. I have done them, but half the time I lose the chip in the drop of solder on the end of the soldering iron.
In my opinion, SMT is often easier than thru hole because you do not need to worry about holes filling with solder. I think it is much easier to change values of an chip on the board than to change values of a 0.25W thru hole resistor. So dive into it with courage. I do recommend a desolder tweezer. Two soldering irons can also work to heat both pads at the same time.
In my lab I stock and resistors but not s, with a few exceptions for milliohm values. If you have a small footprint, it might be easier to solder an chip onto those pads than an .
I would say once you get comfortable with hot air, you start looking at your PCB’s with a twisted sense of size, everything just ends up looking stupidly large, and you may get into a habit of packing things into smaller and smaller sizes
Makes for some fun, but annoying when you then realize the PCB needs to be 5x bigger for the mounting holes
E.g. 10nF capacitors just so perfectly fit across 0.5mm QFP package pins, but it is not an easy task to place them or rework them if you ignore the courtyards, if you follow them, in most cases things will be easy to assemble with sharp tweezers,
That usually requires a paste stencil, too. I have experience only with steel stencils, but I know it can be frustrating to learn to use it. can be soldered with an iron and the stencil isn’t needed. may barely be possible with an iron, too, but only with a good microscope (and good component placement as you said), and I don’t recommend it. Additionally it may be surprising that going to from saves relatively little space. With those sizes the tracks and especially vias take quite much of the space in the board and is worth it only if you can go for really thin tracks and smaller than standard vias – and actually really need all the space you can get.
As for the original question – why not just go after their recommendation. I think the opinions in this thread confirm that suggestion. The question of vs. is interesting in its own right, but not relevant for that.
I used to use for it one 110W trafo soldering iron and one soldering iron with sharp tip. When I have the element (typically ) taken out of PCB and between then I switch off the trafo soldering iron and the element stays at it and it is cold at once. Then I take tweezers to my second hand and take the element off the iron (by switching it on for a second).
In past (when I didn’t had those iron with sharp tip) I have also done special shaped wires used with trafo iron to heat both ends of elements like (I had also special shapes (with one leg bigger) for SOT23 and SOT323).
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We switched from TH elements to and than to and then to and we finished that process in previous century. Now we use mainly and some (mainly 100n blocking capaciotors to place them close to IC pin pairs (VCC+GND) and to not block tracks from next pads.
For me, is comfortable to hand-solder and all my designs use parts (if possible).
I generally use paste and a reflow oven most of the time but for prototypes I’ll often hand-solder first ( unless there BGA parts involved).
I use Kester 959T liquid flux in a squeeze bottle with a needle for SMD work. Can’t stress how good this stuff is for hand-soldering or touching up after a bad reflow. Also, high-quality solder is extremely important. I use Chip Quik SMD291AX paste for reflow and Kester 24-- for hand soldering. Kester solder is the best you can buy in my opinion. I also have a Hakko 915F solder station with a collection of different tips. I find for soldering caps and resistors a chisel tip works best and for QFP and SOIC parts a bent conical (or flat) tip with a reservoir works best.
I’ve been able to successfully hand-solder QFN but I don’t recommend it.
With I’ve hand-soldered a few times but avoid caffeine because hand-shaking can be disastrous. parts often get stuck to the iron tip or go flying across the room never to be found again. Definitely need a 10x microscope or you can get +7 reading glasses on eBay which work well.
looks enormous to me now and I rarely use this size in my work unless it’s a large value capacitor
You can always try, but finding shorted capacitors is a real *&^%$#@!
I have no trouble at all with , or probably even smaller, as I have a decent stereo optical microscope. I’ve heard several others complaining (mainly on youtube) that is already getting hard to solder because they are too small to see properly. This is especially true if do do not have a stereo microscope (Around EUR400) and your eyesight is getting less (often worsening with age, after about 30 years it seems to start slowly). A cheap partial solution is to use a lot of light. And I mean an stupendous large amount of light. When there is a lot of light, your iris contracts, and a smaller iris results in a “pinhole camera” effect on your retina and this gives a sharper picture.
To give a reference for a stupendous large amount of light
Bright sunlight is around W per square meter (perpendicular to the sunbeams), and efficiency of LED’s is no better then 20%.
Your brain fools you. It does not reveal to you that your eyesight is getting fuzzy or a bit vague. It takes a conscious effort to focus on that.
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