{"id":1099,"date":"2009-02-17T10:50:00","date_gmt":"2009-02-17T17:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/17\/hand-soldering-msop-parts"},"modified":"2010-07-24T09:10:24","modified_gmt":"2010-07-24T17:10:24","slug":"hand-soldering-msop-parts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/17\/hand-soldering-msop-parts","title":{"rendered":"Hand-soldering MSOP Parts"},"content":{"rendered":"

I mentioned awhile ago<\/a> that I’ve been hand-soldering rather small SMT parts. I received my latest batch of PCBs from BatchPCB.com last week and populated the most interesting one over the weekend. It has two MSOP parts on it with leads on 0.5mm centers. Here’s one of the chips next to a drafting triangle; the tic marks on the vertical edge are millimeters and the marks on the horizontal edge are sixteenths of an inch.<\/p>\n

\"IMG<\/p>\n

(Sorry for the bad lighting.) Yep, it’s pretty small. Here’s a shot of the PC board. The two MSOP parts will go on the pads near the bottom, labeled “LDAC1” and “LDAC2”. The holes in between labeled “4.096V” and “5V” are 0.1 inch apart.<\/p>\n

\"IMG<\/p>\n

As you can see, there’s not much room between the pads. It turns out that soldering parts like this isn’t really any more difficult than soldering any other SMT IC package. You do have to be careful to get the part aligned just right on the pads before you solder it down, but once you do that and tack down leads on opposite corners the rest is routine. I had to reposition one before soldering it but the other I positioned successfully on the first attempt. I was working under a 5x magnifier, but then I’m over 40 and my near-field vision is not what it used to be.<\/p>\n

Here’s a photo of the completed board. I did make one oversight when I drafted the schematic, but fortunately I was able to correct that by cutting one trace and bridging two pins together with a teeny dab of solder. After that everything worked as expected. It’s a 12-output digital-to-analog converter, with four 16-bit outputs and eight 10-bit outputs. It will be part of a MIDI to CV converter I’m building for my modular synthesizer.<\/p>\n

\"IMG<\/p>\n

Note how IC1 and IC3, with their leads on 0.05-inch centers, seem huge compared to the MSOP parts, and yet they’re quite a bit smaller than their through-hole DIP versions.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: See this post<\/a> for links to a number of helpful videos about SMT soldering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I mentioned awhile ago that I’ve been hand-soldering rather small SMT parts. I received my latest batch of PCBs from BatchPCB.com last week and populated the most interesting one over the weekend. It has two MSOP parts on it with leads on 0.5mm centers. Here’s one of the chips next to a drafting triangle; the… Continue reading Hand-soldering MSOP Parts<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-studio-nebula","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1099"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1523,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1099\/revisions\/1523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}