 It's chiptips, chiptips, I have no music and I can't sing! Working with surface mount components is an essential skill for the maker of electronics. For one thing, some components are only available in surface mount packages, so even if you're only working with a breadboard, you'll still need to solder that thing to some kind of adapter. And when you make a printed circuit board, it's going to be a lot cheaper to use surface mount components because the circuit board is going to be smaller. And when you get that printed circuit board, you're going to want to build the circuit a little bit at a time in order to test each section. Now you could certainly use solder paste and a reflow oven in order to be able to solder an entire circuit board all at once, but that doesn't really help when you're just doing sections of one. It is possible to hand solder surface mount components, which is what I'm going to show you today. But first, you're probably going to need to give up that cup of coffee for at least an hour before you try. Probably the minimum you'll want is a magnifying lamp, preferably one with a clamp. I've seen these start at around $70 US on Amazon and the more you pay, the better they do get. Just six inches is all you'll need to get your soldering iron in the space. All you really have to do is get your face right up to the lens. Just touch it with your nose. That's right. Just touch your nose to the lens. Get right in there and touch it. Now this is my soldering iron. It's a Weller WT-CPS. It's basically temperature controlled, but you don't get to set the temperature. It's got the replaceable tips. Here are some other tips that I have. One is a chisel tip and one is a slightly thinner chisel tip. But I usually stick with the nice thin pencil tip because I do a lot of surface mount. I bought this thing like 30 years ago and it's still going strong. I did have to replace the heater in here once. I would not buy a modern Weller, by the way, because they were bought out by some company that completely cheaped out on the internal components and they're crap now. If you want to buy a soldering iron today, I would recommend a HAKO, H-A-K-K-O. Anyway, this thing heats up real fast. What I also have is never use a sponge to clean your tip because that just sucks away the heat and it causes a lot of heat shock to your tip. Instead I use this sort of, I don't know what this is, copper or brass shavings. This is also by HAKO. This is very cheap and basically all you do to clean your tip is you dip it in once and you're done. So this is pretty awesome. And the other thing that I have is solder. Now I have two different kinds of solder. These are both leaded solder. I suppose I could use non-leaded solder but I don't see why because I'm a hobbyist. I'm not an industry. So my exposure to lead is pretty much zero. This is a rosin core. So it's got the flux on it. Nevertheless, I also have a flux pen which you should use. Don't rely on the flux in the solder because that flux is not going to do a whole lot in getting rid of the oxidation that happens to printed circuit boards when you get them. More flux is better. So anyway, I've also got two different diameters. This one is .4 millimeters. This is what I use for really, really thin pins like for these SOICs. And then I've got this which is, I don't know if it actually says, yeah, it's great. It's .6 millimeters. And I use that for the larger things like for through holes. I would definitely use .6 because with .4 millimeters, you're just going to be sitting there feeding solder in forever. So I have looked at the schematic and I have determined that this capacitor, this is a hundred microfarads, goes over here on C26. C26 is connected to this pin right over here, which is plus five. So this is the plus five regulation thing. So let me zoom in a little bit again. So first what I'm going to do is I'm just going to apply a little bit of flux on there. That cleans the pads. And now for surface mount, what I do is, so this is a relatively large land. So I'm going to use the thicker solder. So what I do is I typically just put solder on one land, not a whole lot. The idea here is that if you're not using a stencil and you're not using an SMD reflow oven, basically what you can do is you can just put solder on one pin, orient your component, and just hold it down, and then heat up the land and you're done. That's it. You don't need to apply a lot of solder and you don't need to apply a lot of heat. That sticks the component down, then you can just solder the other end pretty easily, and then you can put some more solder on the first end and you're done. Now the other thing that is nice about putting flux on is that the solder will just sort of follow the flux into the pad. Sometimes if you're dealing with pins, what I actually do is apply flux to the pins and the solder actually just flows up into the pins, which is quite nice. So there's that one. Now I'm going to apply the one for 12 volts, which is a 10 microfarad capacitor on C25. So that's this guy right over here, C25. So I just have to find my 10 microfarad capacitors. These are quite big because they're electrolytics, and then I just peel this off, and it's going to be done this way. So the nice thing about surface mount electrolytics is that they have a distinctive shape on the bottom. They're not just rectangles, and I have the outline of these electrolytics on the printed circuit board to show you which direction they go. Also I put a plus in so that you know which side is plus. The electrolytics are marked with a stripe on the negative end because kind of the negative symbol is just a stripe. So there's some flux, doesn't have to be a lot. Go ahead and wet the land. Each hands, I'm not ambidextrous, but nevertheless this doesn't require a whole lot of dexterity. So there I just stuck it down, waited for it to cool, and then I am just going to fill that in on one end, and just fill it in on the other end with some more solder, and then I'm done. Usually what I would do, and here is where I would just dip this in, and now it's completely clean and shiny, so usually what I would do at this point is take this, if I were done, take this and look at it under the inspection microscope to make sure that I've soldered these things correctly. Mine is an Amscope Trinocular Inspection Microscope. It starts at about $350 US in Amazon, and if you're going to get one you need the one with the boom arm, that's really useful. In fact if I weren't doing this for you, I would solder the entire thing under the inspection microscope because then I could inspect while I solder. Let's take a look at what soldering one of these components looks like under the microscope, the inspection microscope. So here I'm going to just apply some flux, and then I'm going to wet one of the lands, say this one, and now I'm going to place the component, so unfortunately the tweezers sometimes get sticky from the flux, so just wipe that off a little bit, and I'm going to change the orientation. So I have the component, it's flat, so I can pick it up and be reasonably certain that it's also going to maintain its flatness, and then I'm just going to place it down, and that's it. So it's a little bit wonky, but that's okay, I can maybe fix it a little bit there. So you can see that there's only a little bit of solder on one side, so now I'm going to complete the other side by taking my thin solder and doing this, and then I just add a little bit of solder on that side and we're done. This is a pretty good solder joint because there's not an excess of solder over here and there's this nice sort of slope to the sides. The solder crawls up the side of the component. I suppose you could even have it go over the component like that, but this is a pretty good solder joint. Okay, and now all that's left is this C24, which is the capacitor for the incoming minus 12 volts, and that will go to the minus 5 volt regulator. So now according to the datasheet, this is actually supposed to be either a ceramic capacitor or a tantalum capacitor for whatever reason. They don't want you using an electrolytic capacitor, so I have these one microfarad tantalum capacitors. They're 1206, that's 0.12 inches by 0.06 inches, they're 20 volts, and I think they're going to fit on the lands that was for the electrolytic capacitor. Now there is what appears to be a stripe on one side, so that would be the negative. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take a close look at it under the microscope to make sure that that's exactly what it is, or rather I'm just going to look at it under a magnifying glass and indeed it is minus, so that'll just go over there. Now on these, you can see that there are two terminals, and the terminals sort of go up the side. So these aren't like pins or anything, so you just treat them in the same way. Now of course because this is going to be regulating a negative voltage, the positive terminal is connected to ground, and the negative terminal is connected to negative 12. So I'm just going to flux that, and now I'm going to, let's see, let's use this terminal as the sticking terminal. Now this is especially important for these little components to put them down, see right now it's tilted, right? This end is going to be higher than this end, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab it and just press down very lightly and melt the solder and there it goes. You can feel it just go into place. Now all I have to do is do the other terminal, done, maybe add a little more solder on this terminal and done. Okay, those are the capacitors. Now for soldering chips like this one here, first I'm going to flux it right in the pads, okay, great. Now typically what I do with chips first of all is I'm going to tack down opposite corners, and the reason you want to do two corners is that with one corner the chip can still sort of rotate. So I'm just going to wet a pad, and I'm going to wet the opposite pad, okay. Now I can put the chip down, always being sure to put it down in the proper orientation. Pin one is right here because there is a line next to it, so I just need to flip this around, and then just place it on there. So here I'm just going to hold it in place, and then just push down on the one pin, and then gently pressing down on the chip, I'm going to push down on the other pin, and then I'm going to push down on the chip again and reflow the first pin. So that ensures that the chip now is completely flat and in place. Now in terms of all the pins, first of all again I'm going to flux its pins, and again you can't have too much flux. Now I know that some people use a drag technique to just sort of put a blob of solder on their soldering iron and then just drag it across, and that does tend to work for lots and lots of pins. For this, I mean it's just as easy to just go and solder each one individually, especially when you're using thin solder. Now if I were to drag across here, like let's suppose I just put a lot of solder here, and then just drag across, see that works except with the thin solder I just don't have enough solder on it to make that technique very effective. So that's it, I mean it's just as fast to solder every individual pin rather than drag solder and then have to maybe go back and break some bridges. So that's that. So I can try another chip now with, maybe I can use the drag technique with some thicker solder, maybe that's the problem here. So first flux the pads to get them nice and clean. Second of all, figure out what U4 is. So first I'm going to do opposite corners with a thin solder because you don't need too much. Then I'm going to identify pin 1, that's down here, I'm going to make sure that my chip is oriented in the correct direction, so it's like this, and then I'm just going to hold it in place and tack down one end, push down the other end, and push down the first end again. Okay great, now this is secured. So now I'm going to get my thick solder and see if that actually makes a difference. Yeah that did kind of work, lob some solder on and then just, I guess I didn't have enough solder on, see I tend to just sort of dip the solder in and then not get enough solder for the drag technique, but that sort of worked. Either way, it's chip tips, chip tips, I have no music and I can't sing. Get right in there and touch it.