Re: [avr-chat] isp-usb

[Brian Dean]

On Fri, Mar 10, 2006 at 10:23:03AM -0800, Dave Hylands wrote:

> My secret to doing these is this:
> 1 - I pretin one of the pads.
> 2 - I have a flux pen, and wipe some flux on the pads and over the
> pretinned area.
> 3 - I hold the part in one hand using my tweezers, and melt the
> pre-tinned solder, pushing the part into the solder. This acts as a
> tack and is tyically enough to hold the part in place
> 4 - I hold the solder in the hand I was holding the tweezers in and
> properly solder the opposite end, and then move back and do a proper
> job on the tacked end.

This seems to come up quite a bit.

I put together an SMT soldering tutorial on my web page where I show
soldering both IC components as well as small resistor / cap
components.  To really demonstrate it, since it's a little cumbersome
to explain and even then lots of folks don't believe how easy it is, I
made a little movie clip of soldering on an ATmega128 (64 pin TQFP)
onto one of my MAVRIC-IB boards.  It only takes a couple of minutes:

     http://www.bdmicro.com/smt/

Click the image near the top of the page for the video.  Instructions
for soldering the small resistors and caps is on down below.

-Brian
-- 
Brian Dean
ATmega128 based MAVRIC controllers
http://www.bdmicro.com/