Silicon Chip mag

Author	Message
Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United Kingdom Posts: 8939	Posted: 07:00pm 01 Oct 2025       The main problem that I foresee is with small components. At the moment we still have a reasonable choice of through-hole stuff and quite a lot of the larger sizes of surface mount. Unfortunately the surface mount range that is solderable by hand is shrinking rapidly, with many chips especially only possible to fit using computerised pick & place. I've tried going down to 0402 resistors and it's no joke, even with a steady hand, good lighting and magnification (essential for inspection after soldering). I don't recognize the "build something by loading libraries into a SBC and connect some stuff to its pins" field as anything like the electronics hobby. It's a microcontroller hobby, which is different in many ways. A lot of it is clever stuff, to be sure, but it's not the same thing to me and I've been messing with the stuff since I learned to read the resistor values for my colour-blind dad as a kid, then moved onto using valves rescued from old TVs.