If you are interested in learning and practising hand soldering surface mount components there are lots of kits and projects to choose from. However, we love the thought and care that has gone into the SMT Garden kit from Alpenglow Industries.
Firstly, it’s splendid looking with a lovely design and gorgeous silk screen. If you completely assemble the kit you end up with a really attractive set of patterened LEDs on the board. Alpenglow Industries have curated a nice range of components in a variety of sizes to make sure that, by the time you finish the populating the board, you have a good range of SMD/SMT experience. There are larger 1206 and 0805 components decreasing down in sizes to the slightly trickier 0402. For the LEDs, they have included more than you need so that you can choose what colours you would like to make each flower and still end up with some spares for your component collection.
Other little features grab our attention, there are “practice stalks” which give you the slight challenge of soldering onto pads connected to large copper pours. These copper pours can quickly draw heat away from your soldering iron tip, which is a common obstacle on other boards too. It’s also fun to note that they are controlling the blinking LEDs using a surface mount pair of 555 timer ICs. Using this absolute classic IC rather than a microcontroller gives you a lovely opportunity to learn about the 555 in this project.
On the back of the PCB there is a QR code that will lead you to some SMT soldering instructions and the kit is supplied with coin cell batteries or can be USB powered. If you have a fine tipped soldering iron, some quality flux and some tweezers you are all ready to go! Grab this board and you’ll be an SMT pro in no time.
source https://blog.tindie.com/2022/09/smt-garden-soldering-kit/
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