Working with SMD components at home

Few weeks ago, during one of the meetings of the Vienna Wireless Society ham club, I gave a presentation about working at home with SMD components. The presentation attracted quite a lot of attention, so I thought that it might be worth to share the video recording on the blog. There are two parts of the presentation. During the first part I gave a quick introduction about SMD components for people who have no experience with them. The second part was focused on working with surface mounted devices at home.

Part one is a very quick, 15 minutes introduction to SMD components. I talked briefly about basics and advantages of SMD technology, types of components, gradual abandonment of imperial measure units by device manufacturers and transition to metric system, and confusion that may result from it.
One comment for the video: capacitance of electrolytic SMD capacitors is given in picofarads, not as a fraction of a farad: capacitor marking of 226 means that the capacity is 22 * 10⁶pF = 22 * 10⁶ * 10^-12F= 22 * 10^-6/F= 22uF

In second part I discussed workflow and techniques useful for working with SMD components at home, required tools, and how to assemble boards with surface mount components without a need for specialized and expensive tools.

I'm working on extending the set of slides used for the presentation (for the presentation I had to pick the most important parts to fit in the time allotted for the presentation), and I will publish them once they will be done. There will be also path 3 of the series, with practical demonstration of SMD soldering, which I will give in a few weeks. I will post the third video once it will be available.

Links to videos presented in second part:

"How to Solder QFN MLF chips" from  CuriousInventor

Drag soldering:

Additional links:

• Slides from the lectures
• Part 3 of the class
• Part 4 of the class