[Animats]

He's soldering like it's fifty years ago.

Everything is lead-free surface mount now. Solder paste, stencils, reflow ovens. Hand soldering is precision temperature controlled irons, hot air rework stations, magnifiers, cameras, and exhaust fans. The tools are more complicated, more expensive, and better.

One of the lessons of surface mount work is that you really can move your fingers a thousandth of an inch. But you need magnification to see what you're doing.

I'm encouraged to see more hobbyists going surface mount. In my TechShop days, I was the only one doing surface mount. Everybody else was using 1980s 0.1 inch spacing DIP components. That's a US thing. If you learn to solder in Shenzhen, you start with surface mount.

[Aurornis]

> Everything is lead-free

Leaded solder is easier to work with for personal projects. Careful hand washing and handling is required, but it's easy.

I also recommend people go to surface mount, but I don't recommend beginners immediately go for expensive microscopes and reflow ovens. Stick to 0806 components or larger to start and you can populate a board without any binocular microscope or magnification as long as your eyesight isn't too bad. I can populate 0402 components without magnification all day long.

For small boards, reflow on one of those cheap hot plates. They're small enough to back in the drawer when you're done.

Surface mount doesn't have to be hard or expensive, unless you're doing designs with ICs that come in very fine pitch packages.

[Doxin]

> Leaded solder is easier to work with for personal projects

it really isn't if you use a nice modern lead-free solder. you'll need your iron to be about 20c hotter, but it's not like the early days of lead-free where it'd flow all weird.

[jrmg]

I was extremely surprised when, out of solder recently, I just bought some Draper lead free solder from my local Home Depot(!), and it flowed so much better than my previous roll of fancy lead-free solder from a decade ago. Basically indistinguishable from leaded. I was very surprised.

[poulpy123]

Do you have a brand recommendation ? Leaded solder is unavailable in my country

[Doxin]

not really? I have a habit of using the wrongest solder for my projects. The stuff I use currently was formulated for wave soldering, no clue why it comes in spools but it was cheap.

In general the formulation is more important than the brand, and the formulation isn't /that/ important either. If it's lead free, has a rosin core, and comes on a spool, you can probably use it.

[tuetuopay]

Give a shot to the SAC305 mix. It’s a low temperature lead-free alloy, and it’s the one that made me ditch leaded solder definitively. Use more flux and a bit more iron temperature and you’ll never touch leaded solder again. Oh, and it’s available both as a hand-soldering wire reel and solder paste.

[Animats]

It's the 3% silver that does it. That gets the melting point down. Unfortunately, the price of silver has tripled since 2023. Hobbyists won't use enough solder to notice, but it's an issue in production.

[russdill]

The only place I've noticed a difference is for very large components with a lot of thermal mass.

[Saigonautica]

After moving to Asia, it did seem that fewer of my colleagues remarked on my choice of SMT for everything. I hadn't really thought about it until now!

Custom PCBs are even cheaper here than in North America, and longer workdays meant I had less time for hobbies. That probably made me double down on my choice.

I don't own much fancy equipment, just a cheap hot air rework station. I've found that mixing in fresh gel flux into my solder paste to get the right consistency made a big difference, enough that I never really needed more tools.

After doing that, I just sort of smear some near-ish the pads (perversely, often using a THT resistor), drop the parts in approximately the correct position with tweezers, and heat it up gently. Surface tension handles the rest. Once in a while, an 0402 resistor shifts out of position, but otherwise it just works. I'd probably need better tools for BGA.

What I love best is that SMT microcontrollers can be very, very cheap. I like the attiny10 (36$ for 100 computers! What a wonder!). There are plenty that are under 10 cents each, but I rather like AVR assembler, and their datasheets are very good.

[Fnoord]

I tried soldering. With a TS100 (might have been a TS80P). I tried to solder a a Valetudo Dreame adapter [1]. Took me two hours, then I gave up. I attributed it partly to my unstable hand. Next day I tried to make a USB to (I think) TTL cable. Also failed, the cable wasn't reliable. The fumes were horrible, probably inhaled a lot. I ended up borrowing an adapter, and easily succeeded rooting the damn thing. Never again (the soldering, not the rooting). Same with cable crimping. These physical things are just not my cup of tea. I got two left hands. I hate soldering.

[1] https://github.com/Hypfer/valetudo-dreameadapter

[cyberax]

Try rosin flux, it smells actually pleasant!

A lot of initial soldering mistakes are from using incorrect temperature, not cleaning the surfaces with flux, or from using wrong tips.

You do get better rather quickly, especially if you ask for help!

[Fnoord]

I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I have given up. Maybe it will inspire another reader. I didn't write it to discourage others, but to underline that sometimes, defeat is OK to admit, rather than keep trying.

I mean, a smell is temporary unpleasant but what happened to my health here? I am a former smoker, so I guess damage was previously done there.

This specific iron is a portable one (I had it hooked up on a powerbank), with temperature control and FOSS firmware. It was lead-free soldering tin with flux included. I held the item with my hands, so maybe it did get greased by skin oil, who knows. I had a lot of help from other more experienced people. They guided me through it, with a lot of patience. Without them, I'd been stuck way before. But even they were like... maybe this isn't for you.

My motor skills are just not that good (possibly related to my ASD or father having MS), and I notice that with everything where I gotta use my hands. From elementary school handwriting (learning to write) or even before with tasks like eating, putting clothes on, etc. That is as far back as I can remember. Ever onwards, things like sports. I am simply physically clumsy, and it requires a lot of effort and practice to get on a decent level. Can I do it? Can I hand write? Yes, I can. But it requires a lot of practice to get to a decent level. I can satisfy my wife with my hands though, probably my most important skill I am grateful for. No joke, btw. Although the fact I can, say, give myself food (eat) is probably more important, survival wise.

The one skill I would love to be able to achieve throughout my life, would be programming, not soldering. I mean, something like soldering is awesome, I am a sucker for right to repair, second hand, reusable hardware, etc something like programming comes close to, say, Lego. Though programming wise I am not sure nowadays, given AI. And there too, I tried VB, TCL, C, Java, Python. Multiple Python courses, too, from MOOC, books, to a professional teacher in a classroom. I've been (and am) able to make small adjustments to code, and do some shell scripting (and mIRC scripting, but that was roughly 30 years ago). That's it. That is without AI, I haven't bothered with that. I like to run LLMs locally.

[Joel_Mckay]

Toys like the TS100 are not what people think they are, and tend to cause more harm than good.

Thermal mass is important, please have a look at my other post for a recommended tutorial set. Silver based solders like SAC305 will also stick to most plated pin types.

Sometimes people are given a BS fools errand, and convince themselves there is some hidden secret to workmanship. You would have been better off with a $25 30W Weller iron and $7 flux+Wick kit off Amazon for through-hole style PCB kits. =3

[throwup238]

> It was lead-free soldering tin with flux included.

Flux core solder is crap. It doesn’t contain enough flux to begin with and since it’s inside the solder, it can’t actually do the work it’s supposed to. You need to apply flux separately before soldering, and lead-free solder used to be harder to work with. That’s the leading mistake I’ve seen frustrate beginners.

Steady hands aren’t a requirement unless you’re doing very complex repairs like threading wire through a BGA grid. You’re supposed to use the surface tension of the solder to snap the component’s pins to the PCB pads. After you snap two corners to the pads, you can just glide a tip with some solder over the rest of the pins and the heat and flux do the rest of the work (the flux’s main job is actually changing the solder’s surface tension to make this easier and more predictable).

[wing-_-nuts]

>Steady hands aren’t a requirement unless you’re doing very complex repairs

I remember I was in college when I tried to solder some jump points on my xbox to enable me to mod it. I went in expecting electronics to look like what they did when I was growing up (I used to take everything apart, but I usually was able to put it back together). I open it up to find the jump points are smaller than grains of sand. It left me very much wanting some sort of mechanical aide to help. I occasionally watch videos of people repairing gpus or mbs and I cannot imagine how they do it.

[birdsongs]

It's also shockingly easy to just get boards made and populated these days. I of course have a station but I use it less and less.

I paid like 40€ last week for 5 smaller PCBAs, 0402s all nice and correct, jumpers, all my ICs. Don't have to worry about diode orientation or solder bridges. Just complete boards shipped to me. Easily beats my own labour rates.

[joshmarinacci]

Where did you buy your populated boards from? I want to make a small in and not deal with SMT at all.

[birdsongs]

I use jlcpcb, they're common in the prototype and hobby domains. But there's quite a few board houses in taiwan and china that do this, definitely shop around.

The annoying part is getting the bom and component placement files correct. I use kicad since it's free, and there's solid instructions from most houses on what they need.

[Animats]

JLBPCB does small runs cheap as a loss leader, so they get the production runs, if any, later. Also, they get to see what people are doing, in case something interesting goes by.

There's also a suspicion that JLBPCB may be encouraged to do this by the Party, to discourage other countries from maintaining an independent prototyping capability.

[birdsongs]

Ah, really interesting points, thanks. It definitely seems too cheap to be true.

[vladak]

Unrelated question but I see you're probably located in Europe. Are there any places around to get your PCBs treated with conformal paint ? And I mean tiny runs - couple of PCBs.

[birdsongs]

Just saw this. We have a local producer in Norway we've used but they're pricey, and only used for medium sized prod runs.

It's usually an options at the assembly house you use, bundled with the pick and place and soldering process.

Honestly it might just be worth doing it yourself if it's a few and you only need something like acrylic. Use a good flux off and degreaser, get the board spotless, and use something like this https://no.rs-online.com/web/c/facilities-cleaning-maintenan...

[puzzlingcaptcha]

Few new ICs are made available in DIP format. So you basically have to do SMT at some point.

[mixmastamyk]

Hi, did ya see the reply from star labs on your earlier issue?

[puzzlingcaptcha]

I didn't, thanks for the heads-up!

[PunchyHamster]

lead solder is so much better tho.

But yeah, everything's smd now and stencils and PCBs are cheap enough there is little reson to not go that way