Boy did I have an interesting experience tonight with a 64 pin LQFP chip. The sample dsPIC30F6012A chips arrived today and I immediately set about soldering one to my infamous no solder mask fan out board. Things started out rough. Not like I remembered the first time. The next thing you know I'm holding a .5mm chip in my hand with leads going every direction. Well it was "nothing left to lose" time so I set about getting that bad boy on the board. Wow. Shorted pins etc but it seems to be on there now with no shorts. Lots of flux and dragging the iron across the pins still does the job. Wick the end and ohm it out. The point of this is that these little chips seem to be fairly resilient from abuse. I may have been very lucky tonight :-) I don't want to go through this experience again. So it does bring to mind the assembly of any advanced projects. It may be very difficult to produce a "Ham Fest" type inexpensive (read this...cheap) product using these advanced chips. Well we'll see if the chip works tomorrow :-)
Best Wishes,
--
Regards,
John
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John H. Fisher