Just wanted to say thank you to everyone that helped me go from total novice to holding a batch of PCB’s in 17 days!
I couldn’t have done it without you.
Now to learn SMD assembly. I have PCB’s, components, a stencil, paste and hot air rework station!
Surface mount assembly? Done!
It was surprisingly easy, once you get to know which components are going to jump about when the solder melts and what airflow rate to set, to avoid blowing the MELF diodes off the board!
So far I have only found one error, which was 100% my fault. For one track I used the 32 pin SOIC pinout instead of the 32 pin QFN pinout.
Congrats. I always used to do through hole components for everything. About a year ago now I switched to all smd parts. Even with all hand soldering I find it actually quicker now with smd than TH. No more resistor and cap legs to snip any more. 
Because of this we switched in 1990 from THT to IC THT+ R and C SMD. 1206 those time, smaller we couldn’t buy. THT at top, SMD at bottom. Hand soldering all of that. 0805 was later and around 1995+ we changed also IC to SMD and start to use 0603. I see no problem with hand soldering 0603. 0402 is still possible. 0201 I never tried.
You can also use less space for your parts storage. I use Tic-Tac boxes for R and C.
I never understood the fear of SMD, but I do confess that I also once had that fear. It was not based on experience though, but just on what I heared from other people.
I find THT parts a nuisance to work with on PCB’s. Bending pins, clipping pins, constantly turning the PCB and have some system where the parts don’t fall of when you do so. It’s just yuck. Especially the turning of the PCB and working with the mirror image confuses me a lot.
THT parts are fine for breadboards and one-off projects on matrix boards, but for custom PCB’s SMT is much easier to work with.
Unless the parts get too small. then it may become troublesome.
I’m a hobbyist. When I made my first SMT PCB I thought long and hard about using 0603 passives and SOT23 transistors. I was very tempted to use 0805s, but they didn’t fit into the layout as well and my EE friends said 0603s weren’t that hard to handle. Once you get some practice they’re fairly easy to deal with if you leave yourself enough room around them.
Here’s a visual comparison between a Toshiba US6 package (2.0mm x 1.25mm, 0.65mm lead spacing) and a standard 8-pin DIP (2.54mm lead spacing). Yes, the US6 would fit snugly between the pins of the DIP.
Trying to do SMT work with a soldering iron is a real waste of effort. Hot air is the way to go even for hobbyist applications. I keep toying with the idea of building myself a proper reflow oven out of a toaster oven using one of the several open-source projects out there, but the hot air seems to work well enough for me now.
I do recommend getting at least a desk-mount, lighted magnifying lens if you’re going to do SMT work. I bought a stereoscopic microscope designed for electronic rework from a company that was going out of business; it makes placing components much, much easier.
Here’s a slightly blurry photo of my latest PCB, designed using KiCad (of course!). It uses 0402 passives and a 144-pin TQFP FPGA with 0.5mm lead spacing. There are even some small lead-less DFN and QFN packages on there, though I don’t recommend these without a lot of practice (I built some small test boards first to evaluate their usability).
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