Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Populating SMD Components is Slow


Wow is it slow. I spent most of BDO plodding along soldering down LEDs, resistors and capacitors. I breezed through as many or more through-hole solder joints for the vias in a tiny fraction of the time I spent on the SMDs.

It as slow as point-to-point soldering on a perfboard. I prefer home-etched through-hole boards to point-to-point because of the time difference. If there is a major error in the board it is easy to start over. On a point-to-point board there is a lot of time invested in the assembly.

With my current technique for populating SMDs, I might as well be doing point-to-point. I need to up my game somehow. I'm going to look into solder paste, a reflow skillet and some sort of suction device to manipulate the devices into position.

No comments: