[sdiy] Future SYNTH-DIY/breadboard

[Bob Weigel]

Heheh.  It's easy to adopt this view since throw away electronics and 
obese corporations do go hand in hand historically.  But indeed smt 
stuff has made it possible to give people a lot of products that 
wouldn't otherwise be.  I don't have a cell phone and I usually want to 
destroy them every time I'm around one...and every time I see someone 
driving WITH one..they almost destroy ME :-)  So it's a mixed bag i 
guess at best. -Bob

David Rogoff wrote:

> 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"
>
>
>
>