Modding today's hardware often means moving or removing tiny surface mount components, and using a standard soldering iron feels about as effective as using a hammer to kill a fly. If buying an ...

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,” ...

Electronics components are steadily moving away from through hole parts to using surface mount technology (SMT) exclusively. While the small size of the SMT components can be intimidating, with a ...

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)?

Oregon State University must be a pretty good place to go to school if you want to hack on robots. Their robotics club, which looks active and impressive, has a multi-part video series on how to ...

Soldering is the process of using a metal alloy with a low melting temperature (solder) to fuse the electrical contacts of a component to the pads of a circuit board. Proper soldering maximizes the ...

Tombstoning is a defect where a two-leaded, wrap-around lead-style termination chip component fails to lay down appropriately and allow solder to simultaneously make a required electrical/mechanical ...