[doctek] wants to help ease any fear you may have of surface mount design. He has written this extremely in depth explanation of how to design and build an LED driver composed of surface mount parts.

Should folks building small numbers of circuit boards use surface-mount parts, or should they stick with through-hole components that are so much easier to handle and solder (not to mention see)?

For most of us, soldering electronics means soldering on “through hole components,” that are large and easy to handle. However, when machines build components, they use “surface mount components,” ...

Drag soldering works exactly as its name implies, by dragging a bead of solder across fine-pitch pins you can quickly solder an entire row. The method relies on clean joints, so liquid solder flux is ...

At some stage you will have to work with surface-mount devices (SMDs) and solder them by hand. You can wait until you are forced to learn, or you can leap into the fray with gusto and abandon. At some ...