EEVblog #186 - Soldering Tutorial Part 3 - Surface Mount

It's actually pretty simple to hand solder a TQFP by drag soldering. The key is to use plenty of flux and have solder braid handy to take care of any bridges. [VIDEO] It's sort of a moot point with this Cortex A8 IC though, because the RAM it needs only exists in a BGA package.

Meta : You can open an account at: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] These are forums with extremely helpful members. The format is different than Stack Overflow's "Question/Answer". It is built on the "Post/Thread". You can have threads that go on for 40 pages and span a year, when someone is doing a project, and these magnificent creatures will accompany the users with feedback. One thing I've done when starting to do PCB is submitting the design to electro-tech-online.com asking for feedback and how I could improve it. You'll have people there with decades of experience go through it, make actionable suggestions on the design stinks and why they're not good. You can also share a project you're doing as you are doing it, and they can help with the brainstorming/ideation and implementation, they would ask questions and question assumptions. If you write firmware for microcontrollers, they can also chime in and help you refine the code. If you get into that community, you'll be on a fast track because you'll have people who can do that in their sleep help you in the nicest way. PCB Design : You can get yourself CadSoft EAGLE or KiCad, print the tiny documentation in a booklet format, then read the whole documentation, page by page, annotating it, trying every functionality. Making routes, ground pour, layers, with commands and with the mouse. Dave Jones' "PCB Design Tutorial"[0], will also be very helpful. Soldering : Check out Dave Jones' multi-part videos on soldering[1][2][3]. Part 3 i

It's really not difficult to solder SMD components. See e.g. [VIDEO] for a good introduction to the relevant techniques.