Surface Mount Soldering
Description of this page
Soldering ... ah, we could write pages and pages about it! It's the red-headed step-child of engineering (not that we have anything against redheads!): it's seen as grunt work by many engineers, but the reality is that if you want to be involved in building any electronic devices, it sure helps a lot if you can actually build or repair something yourself.
That said, soldering is actually kind of fun once you build up some confidence and get some practice with it. Sometimes it's nice to actually build something tangible rather than just typing lines of code on a computer all day, or tracing little lines across a screen in a zig-zag pattern but never working with the actual physical results yourself. A lot of people who haven't soldered much are intimidated by soldering, particularly with fine-pitch surface-mount parts. It actually isn't that hard once you know a few tricks, but it's something you really only learn by doing. While you aren't going to learn how to solder reading articles about it, and you're certainly not going to learn how to assemble prototypes just thinking about it, we thought that it was worth sharing some of the tips, tricks and techniques that we use ourselves day in and day out to get things done.
To get started ... we wanted to dispel the myth that working with solder paste requires creating expensive metal stencils! We'll show you that you can do the job just as well, and with a much faster turn-around time, with just 5 € in reusable parts (and a bit of patience)!