I soldered a couple of my FPGA PMODs this evening. The first time really soldering something from the ground up in about a year.

I really was into using small components like 0402 resistors during the pandemic. Current me thinks that I could have used one size bigger, making everything slightly easier.

Two out of three work, no idea what is wrong with the third. I probably destroyed the FPGA trying to fix it. I'll just make some more and circle back to it later.

I'm still happy I got some of it to work and another step in getting back to designing and making new boards.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @mifune's post:

I really was into using small components like 0402 resistors during the pandemic. Current me thinks that I could have used one size bigger, making everything slightly easier.

yeah 0603 is imo the sweet spot (at least for right now) where you can kind of manipulate the parts dextrously by hand, but ime anything 0805 and up starts to be too big to cleanly work in designs for current ICs, which is a bummer

For me it's 0805 when also using SOP packages. Then I can also solder everything with a soldering iron. (And I still have some reels of the stuff). The moment I have to use a QFN package I'm screwed anyway, so I might as well use 0402.

edit: it's going to be interesting when I mix the two. Am I going to use the small stuff for everything, or only the MCU.