SMD soldering – At first, I tinned all the circuit board pads for the SMD chips before trying to mount them. That was a mistake. With both pads for chip tinned, heating up one end of the chip caused ...

For most of us, soldering electronics means soldering on “through hole components,” that are large and easy to handle. However, when machines build components, they use “surface mount components,” ...

Oregon State University must be a pretty good place to go to school if you want to hack on robots. Their robotics club, which looks active and impressive, has a multi-part video series on how to ...

Use of surface-mount technology (SMT) in consumer products offers a major competitive advantage—they enable significant design miniaturization. Surface-mount devices (SMD) come in a variety of ...

Soldering can be quite tricky. If not performed well, it could result to cold solder joints, insufficient wetting, solder bridges and many more. Such things affect the overall performance and ...

My introduction to soldering electronics coincided with a rough patch in my marriage due to appliance failure. When my wife and I got married in 2014, in our quest to save money, we purchased a used ...

In our previous article on Ball Grid Arrays (BGAs), we explored how to design circuit boards and how to route the signals coming out of a BGA package. But designing a board is one thing – soldering ...

Weller’s WTQB 1000 surface-mount re-work station is intended to cover infra-red pre-heating, de-soldering, pad cleaning, positioning and soldering components from 1 x 1 to 42 x 42mm. And BGAs can be ...

TDK has created a range of surface-mount high-current common-mode chokes. “Customers who prefer reflow soldering but need high-current common-mode chokes can now get an SMD solution,” according to the ...