Re:Apple Shipped Me a 79-Pound iPhone Repair Kit to Fix a 1....
by Sirened on Saturday May 21, 2022 @03:45PM
(#31461127)
This was quite a wakeup call for me too. I was always into hobby electronics but a couple of years ago I got into multicopters. A _lot_ of parts were these tiny SMDs. I remember having to figure out how to attach FETs and even (once) a little BGA microprocessor. It was a very steep learning curve and nobody else in the hobby scene here had really done anything with it, so it was a lot of trial and error. Industry has moved on, there are so many things now that are practically out of reach for hobbyists nowadays :/
Re:Apple Shipped Me a 79-Pound iPhone Repair Kit to Fix a 1....
by Animats on Saturday May 21, 2022 @04:19PM
(#31461416)
nobody else in the hobby scene here had really done anything with it
Sparkfun has tutorials.[1]
There are surface mount practice kits, where you get a little board and a bunch of dud parts to practice on. It's not all that hard, but it takes practice. It takes a while to get skill with tweezers under a microscope. Cheap USB microscopes are very useful. Figure on ruining a few of those cheap practice kits.
It's not rocket science, but to do consistently good assembly you need the right tools and some reasonable hand tool skills.
Re:Apple Shipped Me a 79-Pound iPhone Repair Kit to Fix a 1....
by Sirened on Saturday May 21, 2022 @04:26PM
(#31461480)
Ah, no, I was more referencing my local community. We have a fairly vibrant electronics DIY community but the technical skill caps out at around SMD stuff. Thankfully though while the community is largely stuck in the 70s, we aren't actually stuck in the 70s and have the internet to try and figure things out.
Re:Apple Shipped Me a 79-Pound iPhone Repair Kit to Fix a 1....
by Animats on Saturday May 21, 2022 @05:32PM
(#31462069)
We have a fairly vibrant electronics DIY community but the technical skill caps out at around SMD stuff.
I had that experience in the heyday of TechShop. Which I felt was embarrassing for Silicon Valley. Not enough people making stuff.
This is an issue with hobbyist electronics projects in the US. The US hobbyist market is still using 1970s packaging technology - 0.10 inch pin spacing, solderless proto boards, and through-hole parts. I designed a hobbyist board that was all surface mount. Smallest parts were 0.5mm pitch. Although a few people built it, I got a lot of complaints. Surface mount is beyond most American hobbyists. Even though 0.10 inch through-hole is obsolete commercially, and modern parts come in surface mount only.
That said, Apple's aesthetic inherently makes things hard to open. Glass on both sides and minimal bezel is what Apple fans pay for. It forces a heat and suction disassembly process, which requires proper tooling to do right.