I was kind of afraid of SMD things in general a long time but I discovered they are (up to a certain size, 0603 is still okay for hand assembly if you’re patient) comfortable to work with. Even QFN packages are okay if you have access to a hot-air station. I did actually order an BGA sensor out of curiosity along with other things, looked at it and was like “hahaha, thanks, I probably better don’t design that thing into my circuit” (I think it’s a 5-WLCSP package).
tbe
joined 1 year ago
Yeah I have such a small, cheap Chinese one (T962) that I modified and flashed a nicer firmware on.
I basically populated the bottom side (with more components) first after applying solder past with a stencil, then reflowed the board. After cooling down I applied the solder paste to the upper side (with the LED) by using a small needle on a syringe (because using a stencil was too weird since the board wasn’t laying flat) but since the pads are relatively large and not that many that worked fine. Then I placed the components on that side and simply run the reflow cycle again.
I started with the bottom side because there are no heavy components. I expected heavy parts to just fall off on the second reflow cycle so I tried to avoid that.
At the end I manually assembled the USB connector using a regular soldering iron and tons of flux gel.
Maybe you can use this to find more connectors that could match yours: https://connectorbook.com/identification.html?m=NT&n=lo_prof_1r_w2b_conn_1p2 It has a pretty handy identification tool (you can even browse by pictures). It usually suggests quite an amount of connectors but it can guide you in the right direction and you can look at the according datasheets to find out more. By the way the creator of this community made that homepage and a book related to it (or probably the other way round 😅).
Maybe they first have to make it worthless before trying to buy it.
What would be nice is when instances could merge their communities so there aren’t many dedicated duplicates, like I could imagine there are for example LEGO-communities on 7 instances and the according owners of those communities could initiate that they want to merge with others so everyone can post wherever they are but have a common community-feed.
Ah, so I’m basically posting into foreign communities through my home-instance :).
I didn’t know there are major differences between the instances (like the voting system). I’m basically here because the join-page suggested lemmy.world 🤷🏻♂️. But I like it here :). Still haven’t fully understood how these instances work or work not together but I like that you don’t need accounts everywhere you want to post something. Is there a single server that handles user authentication or how do other instances know my account? 🧐
Oh don’t be afraid it doesn’t go to nowhere :D. I just posted some images how that line continues :).
The train on the left is heading into an (under construction) underground section 
There are also some leftovers from a crashed monorail train (no monorails were harmed here, it’s built from regular parts).
On the other end the trains are heading into (modified) winter-village.
In between there are some areas that aren’t built yet but there’s quite some space left. Also I’m a little surprised that shelves hold it up that well :D (they are bolted to a substantial brick wall tho).
It actually depends, on longer posts they somehow disturb the reading flow for me (because they are kind of distracting compared to plain text). For short comments on the other hand I like them and find them rather refreshing.
Thanks for starting a new home for the community ☺️.
Do we like emojis here or rather not? :D
Mine is the smallest one of a series of these, it has two heating elements inside.
I don’t have it for that long but I didn’t have problems so far, I’m usually only making rather small PCBs tho. I did make some recommended modifications like replacing the paper insulation tape with a kapton tape, proper grounding and flashed another firmware.
I did only use a small hotplate and/or a hotair station, so it seems to be definitely a stepup here 😌.