Re: News : ARM Trying to Buy AmperComputing

On 1/24/25 2:13 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Fri, 24 Jan 2025 00:52:03 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
 

    SMD is now sometimes the only way to get chips - and that means
    careful 'oven' work. Super-pain. Basically PCB development is moving
    out of the realm of human makers, everything's too tiny.

 I was asleep at the switch and bought a couple of Pico without the
headers. I have the headers but the soldering task showed the limits of my
vision and manual dexterity these days.

   Yep - it's become BAD.
   About 3mm spacing is the most regular humans
   can cope with, even with mag glasses.

I've never done anything with surface mount other than look at them. 0.1"
grids are as much as I want to deal with.

   SMD is a real pain for one-off work. I'd suggest
   low-temp $older paste fer sure, just so you don't
   (necessarily) roast yer chips. Still, even getting
   the paste applied properly and then the chips down
   perfectly ON the paste ........
   These days, best, use cheapo board-design software
   (hard to get 'cheapo') and send it off to some
   commercial maker. They will do one-offs now - used
   to be 1000 units minimum.
   There was one design pkg - I think it's now been
   redone several times and sells as "Altium" - which
   was easy and intuitive. Some Linux freebies now
   exist which are kinda the same, but maybe not
   quite as intuitive. Some try to be TOO helpful
   in routing the wire traces - very annoying.
   Wanna do it MY way !