Re: Packard Radios

Posted by BigKev On 2015/4/17 9:58:22

Howard, these are "development breakout boards". Basically they mount those million pin ICs on a small board with some of the needed external components so you can quickly wire them up and test the functionality.

Those notches correspond to the 1/10th inch spacing on many headers and also breadboards. Alot of people simply attach wires at the notch locations, but I figure adding header strips at the locations would be easier. The header strips come in 100 pin length. You break of the length off you need, and the positions the strip in notches then go down and "tack" them in with some solder. This then turns that board into pretty much a DIP configuration that can be plugged into a breadboard for easy experimentation.

The bottom side of the board has larger solder pads around the notches. So not so bad, but still a lot of detail work. Much easier than trying to solder to the pins on the IC itself which is an SMC.

Very fine solder, and a pin point soldering iron and a lot of magnification hopefully should do the trick!