| General > General Technical Chat |
| I can't stand seeing or using non-SMD parts. Am I sick? |
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| tautech:
--- Quote from: james_s on September 28, 2019, 10:43:39 pm --- --- Quote from: tautech on September 28, 2019, 10:36:33 pm ---Holes are not at all hard to drill with just a Dremel press and HSS bits in phenolic PCB material. Go to FR4 and drilling is harder. --- End quote --- They're not hard to drill, I have a self made precision drill press with carbide bits but it's still tedious to drill several hundred holes. --- End quote --- A little trick is to make the hole in the annular ring quite small and it helps immensely to center the bit and so speeds up the job. This works well with HSS bits and Phenolic PCB's but go to tungsten bits and they don't have the same flexibility. SMD PCB or not, there are still holes to be drilled. |
| james_s:
Yeah I do that and it does help, I got quite proficient at it for a while. I should post a picture of my drill press, I hacked it together out of some scraps of 2x4 lumber with a precision slide I had laying around, intending it to be temporary but that was 10 years ago. It worked so well I just kept using it. Now it's so insanely cheap to get PCBs that I rarely etch my own but it's still fun now and then and as I mentioned, when I want something today I can go from idea in my head to a board in my hand in a couple of hours and I can do it while I watch a movie or something in the background. |
| Bob Moore:
Well, I prefer SMT components too, they're faster to mount onto a PCB and overall performance is better, at least that's how I feel about it, but I must admit that there are a couple of situations when you're going to want to go with THT over SMT. If you're designing a device you know will be under a lot of stress, you might be better off using THT as it provides stronger bonds. THT is good for fast prototyping For connectors, THT is recommended, you really want those to stay in place, some designers might even go for screws to hold those connectors in place, as seen here https://titoma.com/blog/smt-smd-bga-tht-meaning |
| tszaboo:
Not only, but I have a tendency to make an SMD board as flat as possible. To the extend, where I dont use SMA diode, because DO123FL is has less height. Or a DFN instead of SO8 package. |
| Rerouter:
Gotten far too used to having a 50x50mm PCB filling up almost a meter of screen area, so yes through hole parts are left looking comically oversized, until you need to solder them :) In reality I am usually stuck using through hole as the people who will be servicing the things want it as easy as possible to handle field replacements. (300 deployed, 1 failed due to vehicle being trapped in flood waters after 2 years.. don't know what they think they will need to service) Even gotten to the point of curving traces and using odd chip rotation angles on compact layouts just to squeeze things closer for personal projects, its surprising how dense you can make things if you don't stop to take a big picture look from time to time. e.g. wireless data loggers with a year worth of memory, where the CR1632 coin cell was what determined the size of the PCB, everything else was sitting comfortably. |
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