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[adamduke]

..and somehow missed that THEY ARE ALMOST MICROSCOPICALLY TINY.  Now it looks like I have to order some SOT23-6 boards so I can actually use them, but does anyone know the best way to attach these little buggers without making a mess?

[Gordonjcp]

Practice, and don't be afraid to use too much solder and wick off the excess.  SOT23 is huge.  Just go carefully.  What I tend to do when sticking something that size down is tin one of the corner pads first, then solder the chip or transistor to the board by that pad.  Then I go round and do the rest.

If you find it particularly hard to solder a bit of liquid flux can help and will encourage the solder to stick to just the pads and not bridge the gaps.

Oh, and if you want tiny, try working on Kenwood UHF walkie-talkies:
http://www.gjcp.net/~gordonjcp/capacitor.jpg

That's about the size of a grain of sugar, and is by no means the smallest part on the board.  They fail quite often (this is not the same thing as blindly replacing every capacitor in sight in a broken piece of kit - it's a known stock fault), giving crappy audio on transmit.

[Bogus Noise]

I'm needing to repair something here with SMD components, haven't got around to it yet but found this on YouTube a couple of months ago, demystified things a bit and made the techniques make a bit more sense. I'm also thinking that doing some test soldering on an old graphics card or something similar will be a good plan to get a feel for it first.

Surface Mount Soldering 101

[Z3R0]

I use veroboard to mount these. Veroboard and soft single core copper wire. (I live near a quarry so loads of this gets left behind after they've been blasting, don't know where you'd get it otherwise)

I super glue the LTC to the none copper side of a small piece of vero. Bend out it's legs. Then feed the wire to these legs from the copper side. Soldering the other end of each wire to a seperate track. I then Add the cap and V-reg. You can do it with a bit of practice with ordinary gauge solder but if you want the upper hand to get started it's worth getting some really fine, low melting point solder to make the job easier.

It doesn't look pretty. But it does the job very well and is considerably cheaper than having to pay extra on top of an already expensive IC for more parts in order to use it.....

[Circuitbenders]

You might be interested to know that i've just ordered a huge load of LTC1799's and they will soon be available from the circuitbenders site tested and presoldered to a 6 pin DIP adapter for around £4-ish each. At least thats the price point i'm hoping for.

add a bit of stripboard, a pot and a couple of other components and away you go!

[Z3R0]

That's very reasonable given the price of them bought in small quantities.

[Gordonjcp]

I'll have a couple.  Not sure what I'd use them for, but if I don't support the people who run the site then the people that run the site won't be able to support me.

Let me know when they're done.

[jamiewoody]

same thing happened to me...i ordered several 556 timers from bg micro, and at the time i did not understand what "surface mount" meant...as homer simpson would say "DOH!"

[Gordonjcp]

Surface mount is easier than through-hole.  Much, much easier.

[jamiewoody]

Surface mount is easier than through-hole.  Much, much easier.

if you say so! lol

[Circuitbenders]

surface mount is certainly easier than through hole when you're trying to repair something on a double sided through-hole board that some bastard has put together using lead free solder!