Hand-soldered SSOP microchip in breakout board
I suppose that not all is bad, previous posts notwithstanding. Illness has conspired to prevent me from sharing much of what I’ve done lately, but as I’m feeling better now, here is something new.
Tonight I discovered that I can solder SSOP SMD components by hand with a RadioShack fire-starter, which means I’m pretty sure you can too. It was surprisingly easy, using the “flood-and-suck” method. I soldered it to a breakout board I bought from Hong Kong that would let me use the chip on my breadboard (most SSOP breakout boards don’t work with chips like this one that have heat-pads on the bottom).
(For those who do not know, SSOP components are among the tiniest circuit components. The chip in the photo above, which has 28 individual pins to solder, is about the size of a large aspirin pill—less than half an inch long. Each pin is about 0.01″ wide and 0.02″ distant from its neighbor.)
Prototype traffic light driver
The chip in question is a Texas Instruments TLC5491, the centerpiece of my traffic light driver. I now have a near-final prototype in breadboard awaiting software to drive it. I have some sample code that others have written which should serve as a good starting point.