[Animats]

> Seen many inidie DIY PnP projects come and go.

Yes. The Liteplacer [1] was promising. But they insist on selling it only as an incomplete kit. You have to make your own wooden baseplate. The baseplate should be a piece of metal with the holes accurately pre-drilled, because that's needed for precise positioning. The Liteplacer is for making prototypes; it's very slow. As a prototyping machine, it ought to have a solder paste dispenser, but it doesn't.

We need more low end PnP machines. Most American electronics hobbyists are still using through-hole, decades too late.

Placing SMT by hand is beyond many people. You have to be into using tweezers under a microscope. This is not really that difficult, especially with a cheap USB camera microscope, but it takes practice. I used to get angry emails from people who wanted to build an open source design of mine that had modern 0.5mm pitch SMT components.

https://www.liteplacer.com/shop20/index.php?route=product/pr...

[bboygravity]

What's with the urge to use very small (pitch) SMT components though?

I've had a bunch of (ex) collegues who seemed obsessed with using the smallest possible parts, even where totally unnecessary. My theory is that it's some weird kind of bragging like "look at me I can handsolder parts that are small enough to breathe in".

Not saying you did that in your designs, but just my general observation of people in the field :p

[Animats]

Many modern parts only come in small-pitch SMT.

[abeyer]

I think the reference was more to the "I only use 0201 passives" crowd, which I have seen. If your part only comes in one package no one is going to fault you for it.

[Animats]

Oh. No, I needed a USB inrush current limiter and a switching power supply controller, both of which are usually phone parts and only come in "tiny".

[midoridensha]

Do you mean overly-small SMT components, or any SMT components at all? For the former, I dunno, I guess bragging rights.

For the latter, it's because many parts are only available that way, you can make PCBs much smaller (and PCBs' cost is based on area), and also reasonable-size SMT components are just a lot easier to work with, once you have proper equipment and enough practice.

[RF_Savage]

Smaller parts give more freedom in routing. Or they have had to design something tiny in the past and it stuck.

[crote]

Ironically, in my experience it is often the opposite. Large parts allow you to route traces underneath them or even in between pins. With small parts you often run into issues trying to attach all the required traces at all without resorting to expensive manufacturing methods like microvias.

Larger parts can often easily be routed on a 2-layer board. Got a lot of tiny SMD stuff? Yeah, 4 layers it is.