Another helpful approach to soldering those itty-bitty surface mount chips – Raul used good old stripboard, cutting copper at a few key spots to form a relatively simple breakout board for his 1Mbit EPROM. Now he just needs some data to store on it.
14 thoughts on “Breakout SMD chips on stripboard”
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Ok, I am a perfectionist but….
When I make strip board circuits (that’s mainly what I use) I like the edges of the board to be nicely cut. If you cut the board with a saw or score it and snap it you get left with the jagged edge holes.
I use my bench grinder to grind the edges nice and flat. Takes only seconds and the boards look so much nicer. For something tiny like this though hold it with pliers and stand off to the side in case the grinding wheel grabs and flings it!
It’s to bad this Idea gets extremely convoluted for any thing over 14 pins. Not bad for turning all those small surface mount parts in to breadboard compatible units though.
@Oblivion – true, it’s likely best suited for 8 pin packages
@Simon – I get a bit picky about clean cut edges myself. Though I know it’s not necessary I like to make ’em all purdy.
Those solders joins are atrocious. There is too much solder, which indicates it was over-applied in order to milk flux out of the solder. To avoid this, clean up prior to soldering with a pen eraser. Another way to avoid this is to use liquid flux, cleaning it up afterward with ethanol and a steel brush. The joins are dull in appearance, implying that they are cold as well. Now, the excess solder has to be removed and the joins properly heated. Use desolder braid to clean them up. When holding the IC in place initially, use a wooden stick (kabob skewer) to hold it in place, as opposed (in order to avoid thermal conduction through the device) to something metallic. The fourteen pin device isn’t a challenge, just solder it in place, test for unintended commons with an Ohm-meter and clean off any solder whips with the (properly-scaled) desolder braid. Also, the foils need to be tinned. Bare Cu isn’t environmentally stable for electronics.
@Don – that’s actually not solder in the above pic, check out Raul’s post for more info.
use concrete walkway to grind the ed.ge of stripboard flat
hold stripboard vid verticle rubbing on concrete until smooth