Surface Mounted Devices

February 6, 2011

I recently purchased an electronic kit to make a tachometer, with the aim to measure the speed of my lathe and drill. Given that I’ve only got a mini sized lathe and it’s fixed speed there’s no real reason to do this other than curiousity and that I fancied making up a kit as I’ve not done that for some time.

What I forgot to read in the small print was that the components were surface mounted. Luckily the board came with the most challenging component the IC already attached to the board.

A search on google and a shout out on twitter gained me all the resources I need to complete the task.

Paul Anderson pointed me at some great tutorials at Sparkfun.

John Honniball‘s tips were “As with all surface-mount, use good lighting, fit a fine soldering iron tip and use magnification”.

I also found the following video via curious inventor and the chaps at piclist had plenty of comments on the topic of smds.

Another rev-counter kit I made up many years ago for my Dad is this 4 digit timing module from Quasar electronics. That’s a good alternative if you don’t want the challenge of a surface mount kit.

Watch this space, hopefully there will shortly be a blog about how I did this successfully…

By Andy from Workshopshed One Comment

  Posted in: Uncategorised Tags: pcb, smd, soldering, tachometer