Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Dummy components for soldering practice.

Short answer: Don't bother.

If you're a single person trying to learn to surface mount solder, you might think "Hey rather than waste real chips when I screw up, maybe I should get blanks or dead chips to practice with." I looked into it. You're better off ordering cheap breakout boards and cheap live chips. The main producers of dummy chips are Topline, and Practical Components. Neither list their prices online, meaning you have to email a sales representative to figure out if their prices are even within reason for what you want. Both sites have $50 minimum orders, but practical components will charge you $10 if you order less than $50. Topline just has a minimum. I only looked at Topline's prices, as I didn't want to have to do the whole "sales rep" thing again. Their kits are ridiculously expensive, one kit they wanted $90 for 4 chips and a pcb to solder them to. Their dummies are closer to reality, but still outside of it. With a minimum order of $50, They want $2.50 for an lqfp-64 0.5mm chip. I can get a real microcontroller from mouser 10 at a time for less than that.  Get some breakout boards from Futurelec, and some cheap chips from Mouser or DigiKey. I'm sure these guys have a place in larger companies, but if it's just you, don't bother. They don't want your business anyway.

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