Sloppy Reflow Soldering

I'm giving a quick talk at $WORK about the genmon raspberry pi project I'm working on, and the scope of that project. Ideally, this will go from problem statement, circuit design, schematic capture, board layout, PCB fabrication and construction. In 20 minutes!

Part of that is the magic of reflow soldering with solder paste for the SMT components on the board.

To illustrate this, I just squirted way too much paste on six 0603 resistor locations on the PCB, dropped some resistors on it.. and then cooked it with the hot air tool. Components go surfing on way too much solder.

The result is a hot mess, as expected, but demonstrates that the paste is really tiny solder balls suspended in the magic flux. And the awesome power of surface tension and how it pulls parts around at that small scale.

And this nicely illustrates why we have solder paste stencils. Or maybe thinner dispenser needles. Or something.. else.. not this.

Here it is! Enjoy! (Yeah, I know the clock on the microscope camera is wrong...) Sloppy Reflow