Re:DIY Through Hole Plating of PCBs (2017)
by londons_explore on Monday March 15, 2021 @05:32AM
(#26463985)
Unless you value your time at < $5/hour, it's always more money efficient to just pay for a PCB for a prototype rather then getting into dead bug soldering. There is no such thing as a "quick" dead bug project, and the time taken is always more than the time to lay out a pcb plus its cost.
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You probably misunderstood. Dead bug does not mean creating entire circuit out of PCB. Dead bug is a single chip you put on its back (hence, dead) so that you can get EASY access to its pad. This is only very small number of cases (I did TWO this year), for everything else I have selection of adapters and development tools to make my life easy.
It doesn't cost a lot more of effort to solder a single SMT chip this way. I already solder everything else to the board anyway so cutting couple pieces of wire to tack them one by one does cost maybe couple additional minutes for a small size chip, and then I can go to working on the rest of the prototype.