Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Dead Bug Soldering

The other day at work (I'm doing research at my university), I had some down time and decided that I wanted to see how small I could make the analog section of a circuit I'm working on given the parts we had on hand. I was concerned with the size of the circuit at the time, and doing this actually let me see a better way of laying out the PCB and reducing the size.

The following pictures are my first attempt at dead bug soldering:



If you were wondering the device is a lock-in detector for detecting light at a specific phase and frequency.

I'd say, for a first attempt, it's not bad. The layout is pretty neat and if I had surface mount versions of the large red capacitor and the ICs, the size could still be reduced further, but (most importantly) it was tested and worked!