I've spent thousands of dollars (equipment, parts, circuit boards, etc) and months of time trying to smd solder a single circuit. I have gone so far as to design practice boards with similar but cheaper components. I just completely lack the skill. It's disheartening, really, but I need this circuit to work. It'll unblock so much progress on my telescope side project.
@noodlejs Curious about this. When I did do SMD soldering (a few years ago), it really only worked when I wore Donegan binocular magnifying lenses (5x). I also joke I also needed a shot of whisky, but that's not really true... There's also the solder paste route with controlled board heating, but I never tried that.
@noodlejs Oof, I wouldn't have been able to solder those either. I always restricted my designs to packages that had exposed pins. Those packages you have there really cry out for solder paste. Something that might work short of hacking a toaster oven to solder an entire board, is using a temperature controlled hot air gun with solder paste. But this isn't something I've tried, so I'm not saying it will work!
@ambihelical I actually thought about getting some binocular magnifying lenses. They seem like a game changer for sure, I just wasn't sure what zoom was going to be helpful. 5x makes sense. In a small way, I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one to struggle with this kind of soldering lol. And yeah, I can definitely see the shot of whiskey helping!
Attached is the massacre of silicon I call "success". (Only 1 chip was responsive, and this was the best I could do lol).