So surface mount it is

[paulca]

Now, something has changed. Probably the discovery that many modern components are SMD-only, and the eagerness to try something new. So for the project I'm currently working on, I decided to finally go ahead and just embrace SMD everywhere.

Yea, it was one IC that nudged me towards SMD.  It only came in SSOP-28.  I had to have a go.  At first I was reserved to actually soldering the breakout board into a project and remaining 99% THT.

But then I bought some practice boards and found it was perfectly possible to solder even 0603 with a basic magnifying lens, a jewellers visor made that even easier.

This inspired me to give paste and hot air a go.  Again this seemed to make things easier.

When laying out a PCB in KiCad I put the SSOP-28 into the board SMD and then placed a THT 100nF decoupling cap on it's power pins.  It looks ridiculous. The "tiny" cap towers over the chip like a 1980s car phone beside a Samsung Galaxy.  The ATMega in DIP 28 looks even worse. 

I have a long term project to make an audio box which at present count will have something like 9 opamp ICs.  I had bought 10 x DIP-8 chips for the project, but doing a quick layout in a PCB editor it's going to end up 6" square with THT.  Making it SMD will half the boards size.

The only thing that hangs off the move to SMD, slowing it down is of course breadboards.  It means to prototype a circuit you either have to have the same chip in DIP + associated THT passives or a breakout board. 

Someone needs to come up with an innovative way to mount SMD onto breakboards.  There are the little "jaw clamp" things for chips but they are large and expensive.  Someone needs to come up with something smaller that is integrated into the breadboard.  I can see the trouble is the number of different packages.  A row of SSOP connection points running up the middle of the breadboard would work, until you had an SOIC or FQP.