Thanks for the note Jake. I feel like my solder tip at home is going to be too big for this, but thanks for the vote of confidence. I was thinking about just getting a smt board from Adafruit and going from there instead of all this crazy stencil stuff. Seems like a lot of work for just one or two boards.

On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 4:07 PM, Jake <jake@spaz.org> wrote:

you can solder parts like that with an ordinary soldering iron, i can show you how. It's not hard. Do you have a PC board made yet?

I'm assuming you have two or three chips per board. If you have like a dozen chips per board you might prefer to do it with stencils, which you can cut from transparent folder covers (thesis binder cover) with a laser cutter. Then once you have the solder paste in place, you put the chips on with tweezers and rest the board on a hotplate for 60 seconds.

the other option is to dispense the solder paste with a 3d printer, like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgXtRDVvhdU

-jake

On Fri, 10 Jul 2015, Cere Misc wrote:

So there's this chip that I just gotta have for a project I am working on. The only problem is that it seems like EVERYTHING in IC form now it packaged in these
teensy little surface mount chips. I don't have a small enough soldering iron and I'd rather not hassle with trying to make it work with my shitty equipment.
Wondering if sudo or Noisebridge is set up for a solder reflow oven with an accurate temperature control? Also, I am not totally clear about how I create a
silkscreen soldering setup for a given PCB design. Does anyone on this list have a lot of experience with this?

Thanks,
Cere