[sdiy] Future SYNTH-DIY/breadboard

[David Rogoff]

R. D. Davis wrote:

>Quothe Scott Gravenhorst, from writings of Wed, May 25, 2005 at
>10:49:46AM -0700:
>  
>
>>This is my BIGGEST gripe about surface mount.  Sure it's great for
>>mass assembly of stuff, but how does a hobbyist/inventor deal with
>>    
>>
>
>It's not exactly great for that in a way either, that is, for the
>purchaser of mass assembled equipment, since it's a pain to
>troubleshoot and repair when something goes wrong.  Not to mention
>that it also makes equipment a pain to modify.  Surface mount
>technology is a bad thing no matter how one looks at it, except for
>the large corporations using it to increase their already obese
>profit margins.
>
>  
>
What a bunch of stupid statements.  Let's all throw out our cellphones 
and Ipods and laptops and disk drives and most computer equipment that 
would be virtually impossible without SMT.  Let's see Altera and Xilinx 
have 1000+ pin leaded FPGAs.  Let's see Intel and AMD get 3GHz 
processors working in a PGA package (like those are easy to 
re-work/modify!). 

Yes, it's hard, but not impossible, to solder to SOICs and QFP packages, 
and basically impossible to work on BGAs.  However, companies don't 
switch to these to help their profits (it's a pain for companies, too: I 
went through a big, expensive, pain-in-the-neck, leaded->SMT switch in 
the mid '90s). They do it to get stuff to fit in small places and 
because the packages are better for heat management and high-speed 
performance.  And because the leaded components get discontinued.

I'm fixing up a '70s analog synth and an '80s digital synth at the 
moment. If they were SMT I probably wouldn't go near them, true.  But 
the alternative is that almost nothing from the last 5 years could 
exist.  It is a bit depressing that most stuff now can't be fixed, just 
replaced.  The best thing is the work that been talked about with making 
things lead-free, etc, to reduce the impact of things being trashed, but 
things will keep going forward. 

This has all come up before: why have ICs, transistors are easier to 
work on (or tubes, or whatever).

  David

p.s. - you should be amused that the Thunderbird spell-checked suggested 
replacing "SMT" with "smut"