They are called soft termination, I’m not sure if that’s available for every component, it came to my attention on ceramic caps. It’s a dedicated feature you can filter components e.g. on Digikey.

I’d say that’s a version of a soft termination capacitor. They are used when there’s risk the board is flexed or exposed to mechanical or thermal shocks to prevent cracks in the capacitor (causing it to fail short).

Mine is the smallest one of a series of these, it has two heating elements inside.

I don’t have it for that long but I didn’t have problems so far, I’m usually only making rather small PCBs tho. I did make some recommended modifications like replacing the paper insulation tape with a kapton tape, proper grounding and flashed another firmware.

I did only use a small hotplate and/or a hotair station, so it seems to be definitely a stepup here 😌.

I was kind of afraid of SMD things in general a long time but I discovered they are (up to a certain size, 0603 is still okay for hand assembly if you’re patient) comfortable to work with. Even QFN packages are okay if you have access to a hot-air station. I did actually order an BGA sensor out of curiosity along with other things, looked at it and was like “hahaha, thanks, I probably better don’t design that thing into my circuit” (I think it’s a 5-WLCSP package).

Yeah I have such a small, cheap Chinese one (T962) that I modified and flashed a nicer firmware on.

I basically populated the bottom side (with more components) first after applying solder past with a stencil, then reflowed the board. After cooling down I applied the solder paste to the upper side (with the LED) by using a small needle on a syringe (because using a stencil was too weird since the board wasn’t laying flat) but since the pads are relatively large and not that many that worked fine. Then I placed the components on that side and simply run the reflow cycle again.

I started with the bottom side because there are no heavy components. I expected heavy parts to just fall off on the second reflow cycle so I tried to avoid that.

At the end I manually assembled the USB connector using a regular soldering iron and tons of flux gel.

It actually depends, on longer posts they somehow disturb the reading flow for me (because they are kind of distracting compared to plain text). For short comments on the other hand I like them and find them rather refreshing.

Thanks for starting a new home for the community ☺️.

Do we like emojis here or rather not? :D