Re: gEDA-user: Free Dog meetings at MIT starting this September!

[Dave McGuire <mcguire@neurotica.com>]

On Aug 24, 2004, at 5:44 AM, Karel Kulhavý wrote:
> > I've got to agree completely with Dave here.  Having soldered more 
> > than
> > a couple of things together in technologies ranging from vacuum tube 
> > to
> > high pin count fine pitch chips over the last 23 years since my first 
> > soldering
> > iron, I find that about the easiest thing is a board with 1206 
> > passives
> > and SOIC chips.  I'll grant you that things like QFN are a pain, but
> > an SO16 isn't and 1206's are so much faster to work with than leaded
> > resistors and capacitors.  In fact, I almost always use surface mount
> > parts when building up a quick prototype on some proto-board material.
> But the SMT capacitors we are having here in retail stored don't have 
> any
> numbers printed on them. Have you also encountered that problem?
  Leave them in the package until you use them.  With through-hole 
components, I use little trays and get out all the parts I'll need 
before I start soldering.  But with SMT components, I leave them in 
their little paper strips (the way they come when you buy more than two 
or three of them...I buy SMT resistors a thousand at a time because of 
the quantity breaks...they typically cost three bucks per thousand) 
until I'm ready to place them on the board.

            -Dave

--
Dave McGuire             "...it's a matter of how tightly
Cape Coral, FL             you pull the zip-tie."       -Nadine Miller