I got some new PCBs yesterday:

Some very small PCBs

They’re kinda tiny. I’ve been thinking I should break my long SMD hiatus and do some surface mount projects. But for breadboarding, what do you do? Through-hole equivalents where they exist, breakout boards that carry SMD part pins to 2.54 mm pin headers where they don’t. These boards are for SOIC-8, SOT-23, and SOT-363 parts. The SOT-23 ones would have a single right angle 3-pin header, the other two would have pairs of straight headers.

Those SOT-363 footprints are tiny! (And that is allegedly KiCad’s hand soldered footprint version.) Someone on the LMNC Discourse tells me they do SOT-363 with a soldering iron, but I have a hard time imagining myself doing it. I have both a hot air station (which might just blow the board away, never mind the part) and an as-yet-untested hot plate. We’ll see what works… if anything…

I got these done at OSH Park. For tiny boards like this they’re the cheapest, at least for US customers, because (1) their board price is proportional to board area with no lower limit and (2) they ship free to US addresses.

I was proud of myself for thinking to include a place to note the number of the part:

Reverse sides of the PCBs, showing white silkscreen rectangles taking up most of the area

… if I can write that small.


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