Whether you’re a book-learned engineer looking to finally get your hands on building circuits, or a maker, hobbyist, or student, these instructional videos get you started. The basic metallurgy of ...

Soldering to a PC board can be tricky: Too much heat can make the copper trace lift right off the board substrate. Use a soldering pencil rated at 15-25 watts, no more. (Watch the video; story ...

SMD soldering – At first, I tinned all the circuit board pads for the SMD chips before trying to mount them. That was a mistake. With both pads for chip tinned, heating up one end of the chip caused ...

In our previous article on Ball Grid Arrays (BGAs), we explored how to design circuit boards and how to route the signals coming out of a BGA package. But designing a board is one thing – soldering ...

The Ball Grid Array, or BGA package is no longer the exclusive preserve of large, complex chips on computer motherboards: today even simple microcontrollers are available with those little solder ...

In Part 3 of our weeklong series about local manufacturing, WGLT visits a Bloomington company that serves both farms and the ...