@ Architect - yeah, i have got it down to 8 days with standard service.
Pretty impressive in my book…
Sure thing… I love blabbing about my project here. I’ll be making a full court push to get everything soldered up and tested that same day as well.
Until then, I’ll be trying to fumble my way through adding UDP to the WiFly driver.
Check em out! One week exactly from upload to delivery. I’m going on a little weekend trip to San Diego tomorrow. I wanna stay home and build my boards now damnit!
The jacks along the back and left side of the board are missing silk screen… and now that I check my Gerbers in CAM350 again I see that it was my mistake. Not a huge deal for my first order, this board is meant to get hooked up once and pretty much left alone anyways.
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@ FireyFate - Looks good!
@ FireyFate - nice one young man.
look forward to the build 
Nice 
Where are the rounded corners =P?
Ughhh… I’m really wishing I wouldn’t have gone for those dual mosfets in the 6 pin TSSOP package. I’ve spent the last two hours hunched over my bench with a monocle in one eye. So far I have a serious neck ache and one damn IC soldered… oh and a lifted pad too.
After lifting the pad trying to use solder paste that left a huge bridge, I decided to just do the next one with a lot of liquid flux, thin solder, and a hoof tip. That seems to work pretty well on the one I managed to do.
The problem is getting the IC in place. If it was a big 44 pin or something I could do it no problem… but with a 6 pin where the body is 1.5 x 2mm, how am I supposed to tape it down?!? I’m attempting to use Kapton tape and tweezers, but every time the tape sticks the IC is in the wrong position. I spent at least an hour taping the same IC down, getting it wrong, then trying again.
Any tips? At this point I feel like throwing the boards in the trash and redesigning with different MOSFETS… but when I was originally spec’ing parts all I could find were these or super oversized through-hole parts.
Sore back. Tell me about. After soldering the 200 pins on the ChipworkX by hand my back was aching too!
As you a tip, I normally apply a little solder to one corner pad and use tweezers to place the part. I found that the bent style tweezers work best. I then solder this corner and make sure it is aligned. Then I solder the opposite corner and then the rest of the pins. Works about 99.9% of the time.
I’ve just done this the other day with a prototype board that had a 20 pin TSSOP part.
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I wish it was a 20 pin! I feel like it would be easier to get fixed in place somehow if the body wasn’t an eighth of the size of my little finger nail.
So if I’m understanding correctly, you tin the corner pin then heat it as you place the IC with tweezers?
I’m going to take a board to work tomorrow and do it under one of our scopes… should relieve the neck strain a little bit…
I got a set of bifocal glasses made for working with the PCB’'s. If you get them to make the top part plain glass (assuming you don’t need glasses in the first place) and the lower part at 3 x mag they work great for SMD PCB work. I am going to get a second set with 4 x just for the really small stuff.
I find these easier than trying to place the maginifier in the right place. They also don’t take up any desk space
@ FireyFate - Lately, I use solder paste & hot air for just about everything. If you have hot air I recommend you give it a try. I dab a tiny bit of solder paste on each pad with a toothpick then place the part and apply the air (gently) and watch it squirm into perfect placement.
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Closest thing I’ve got to hot air is a heat gun. I have a hot air station on my Amazon wish list… but I’ve hit my electronics budget for the month!
@ FireyFate - you can use a heat gun with care 
Well, I’ve got a little experience with an iron and none with hot air… so I think I’m gonna try a scope here at work and the method Dave was suggesting.
I couple [em]probably[/em] kick one of our assemblers a little cash to put them on for me after shift… but I want to get to the point I can do it myself.
And next month I might just spring for a hot air station or an oven.
I’d stick with the soldering iron method rather than resort to a hot air gun - maybe I’m just too precious ? 
Here’s the advice I’ll offer. Use flux - even if you have flux cored solder, you still need more while you’re trying to learn how to do this on such a small scale. Personally, I’d flux the pads and the legs of the TSSOP, locate it on the pad reasonably accurately, add a little solder to the iron tip, and dab the iron to the leg/pad combo. The aim is to get the leg and pad to heat up and the flux to help the solder flow evenly - and then remove the iron carefully. You want to just tack the first leg on, and if it doesn’t let the other legs line up you just need to reheat it again and make small adjustments - staying off the coffee helps too Once you have one leg soldered, then do the one diagonally opposite, make sure everything is still lined up and hit the other legs.
And as for magnifying, I bought a $8 magnifying headset, like http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/10X-Lighted-Magnifying-Glass-Headset-Dual-LED-Head-Headband-Magnifier-Loupe-/280959715915?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_15&hash=item416a810a4b (a touch cheaper than when I bought, who would have thought ! ) They’re not great for small SMD work since you need to be close to focus them, but they’re better than nothing !
Instead of an oven, I’d suggest you just practice I have total faith that you’ll master TSSOP, it’s just the number you stuff up before you become proficient that’s the variable 
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Yup, I used liquid flux on the one that I managed to install reasonably well. I originally ordered 10 of these parts when my board uses at most 5 (it’s a multi-purpose design)… I’m thinking I should have just bought a a couple dozen lol.
Your method sounds great. I’m going to also show it to our lead assembler, and I’ll see how it goes with the scope today… as long as I’m only doing around a board a week, I can just do the small parts at work. If I were to get to a point where it was a side business they might frown on that though!
Well, I’ve seen better (as in every time I’ve ever looked at an IC through a scope), but I think I got everything stuck to the pads with no bridges.
Now I’m going to do the “large” components like 0603 footprints on my home setup.
And I took the bait and ordered that super stylish 10x magnifying headgear from Amazon as well.
Well, good news is I got all the parts on and it fundamentally works. Bad news is the MOSFETs introduce noise on the 12V and the SD is hit or miss… I’m thinking maybe my 3.3v and 5v regulators are not quite filtering out all the noise from the 12V.
I’ll get on it with an oscilloscope after work, maybe try a better 12v supply as well.
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@ FireyFate - Very nice looking board!