New video by Michael; The Factory | Testing High Frequency SMT Protoboards

New video! If you want to experiment with analogue electronics, at some point you have to move off the breadboard. A breadboard is useful, but has a high capacitance between net ties that can wreak havoc at high frequencies. This week in The Factory we’re test-driving our SMT Protoboard (now in gold!).

• High-Frequency Protoboard:
We built a +20dB amplifier that works on the protoboard at 2.4MHz. The exact same circuit can only work up to about 400kHz on a breadboard!
The circuit is a bit contrived because we had a 12MHz gain-bandwidth amp (TL971) to test with.

• GlowBit - Now in black!
We’ve been going back and forth with the WS2812Bv5 manufacturer and we’re happy to announce that our GlowBit matrices will be available with black LEDs - nice!

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Hi Michael
Re solder bridges. Ah, the curse of people who use soldering iron tips tinned on both sides. Personally hate em. I have found over the years that if a tip is only tinned on one side (the business surface) the risk of unnoticed bridges is minimised. The solder size can help here too. Unless I have a good reason the largest solder I tend to use os 0.7mm. I have some smaller but for general use this disappears a bit quick so I stick with 0.7mm usually

I recently purchased (from Core) some Hakko tips I am going to (when they arrive) try on my Goot solder station. Hope they fit. I purposely ordered tips with the “F” in the type number for this reason. Get he solder where you want it, not where it wants to go.
Cheers Bob

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