Microscope for SMT

Here are a few pictures of an early Birthday present from my wife:

The 10x magnification makes it perfect for soldering and inspecting smt. I was able to hand solder the 208 pin 0.5mm pitch Xilinx Spartan 3 FPGA used on my HPSDR board in under 5 minutes which included inspecting each pin. If you do any serious smt work at all, you may want to consider purchasing a similar microscope. I was amazed at the difference it made in speed and comfort while working with fine pitch parts. (Price is about $214 + shipping).

Comments

Anonymous said…

Hi

I really enjoy SMD projects - and have magnifiers and headset mag too - but this looks really neat - could you pse provide more details (product name - availability)?
Tnxs!

73 John VE3NFK ve3nfk@rac.ca

10:34 PM

Anonymous said…

I also am interested in this and I couldn't find anything like it in the mentioned price range. So finally I looked at the image file name and then searched on bs20 microscope and found this site:

http://bargainmicroscopes.com/scopesmenu/showdetail.php?id=38&prodname=BS20

No price information. This is a difficult product find on the net.

2:20 PM

History of HPSDR Mercury and Quick Silver

History of HPSDR Mercury and Quick Silver Philip Covington, N8VB Early HPSDR and XYLO In 2005 I started a High Performance SDR (HPSDR) project which was to consist of a motherboard carrying a FPGA/USB 2.0 interface and power supply with the provision for plug in modules through 40 pin headers. I had planned a narrow band high dynamic range module based on a QSD/DDS/PCM4202 audio ADC and a wide bandwidth module based on a high speed 16 bit ADC: http://www.philcovington.com/SDR/PICS/HPSDR_FPGA_USB_Board_top1_800600.jpg http://www.philcovington.com/SDR/PICS/HPSDR_FPGA_USB_Board_top4.jpg I soon selected the LTC2208 ADC from Linear Technology. A representative from Linear Technology came across my blog ( http://pcovington.blogspot.com/ ) and offered evaluation boards and samples to support the project. At about the same time my HPSDR project came about, Phil Harman, VK6APH and Bill Tracey, KD5TFD were interested developing a sound card replacement to be used with the SD

QuickSilver QS1R Software Defined Receiver Prototype

QS1R Software Defined Receiver: (Click on picture above for larger version.) Features: 16 bit 130 MSPS ADC HPF, LPF, RF AMP Switchable Front End 0-31.5 dB Attenuator in 0.5 dB steps Cyclone II FPGA Two AD6620 DDC co-processors USB 2.0 480 Mbps High Speed Interface to PC 0.1 to 33 MHz coverage (0.1 to 65 MHz extended) RX bandwidths from 33 MHz to 1kHz Two independent RX channels anywhere in 0.1 to 33 MHz 6.00" X 4.00" board size Single +12V 1A supply Open Source Software and Hardware Availability: Projected late January to mid-February 2007

Philip A Covington’s Blog

Search This Blog