I won’t say this is the simplest and easiest way to do surface mount soldering, but it is working great for me and my students. The trick is to use a very tiny amount of solder paste and a heat gun. The information, circuit board and code that you can download here will take you through the steps to build an SMD board with a PIC16f690, eight resistors and eight LED’s. It will use two capacitive touch pads and a neat little programming trick described in Microchip App Note AN1298, to work as capactive touch sensors. The code can be compiled and edited using Great Cow Graphical Basic.
The guide to surface mount soldering, as presented at the BCTEA Conference in Kamloops, is here.
Note: Links to the full-page printed circuit board and compiled HEX code will be coming shortly, WordPress is not allowing me to upload them due to “Security Reasons”.
Building Robots at School 
Excellent post Mr. Brett! You’ve inspired me to try this out with my students!..Mr N..
Comment by Brad North — October 23, 2011 @ 6:51 pm |
Thanks for the tip, Mr. Brett. I find SMD soldering quite frustrating.
Of course, there’s also the toaster oven reflow trick, which I might end up using.
Comment by oakwhiz — November 8, 2011 @ 1:23 pm |