Has anyone ever seen a protoboard (just copper tracks like any hole through) aimed at SMD/SMT components?
At the moment i'm using protoboard to hand solder resistors, caps, LEDS, anything 2 pinned really, but a sop8/sop16 is giving me more issues, so i'm resorting to mixing hole through and surface mounted components together (mix and match)
it would be nice to see some kind of protoboard or just have to accept developing PCBs and etching them is probably my next step..
cjdelphi:
Has anyone ever seen a protoboard (just copper tracks like any hole through) aimed at SMD/SMT components?At the moment i'm using protoboard to hand solder resistors, caps, LEDS, anything 2 pinned really, but a sop8/sop16 is giving me more issues, so i'm resorting to mixing hole through and surface mounted components together (mix and match)
it would be nice to see some kind of protoboard or just have to accept developing PCBs and etching them is probably my next step..
The only ones I have seen that accept more than one SMD component are the ones from Roth Electronik. They are small, expensive, and the range is very limited.
I normally prototype using SMD-to-DIP adapters. You can get these from Sparkfun (or proto-pic in the UK), Schmartboard, Futurelec, and from various eBay sellers. Once you have your SMD components mounted on DIP adapters, you can use them in breadboard, stripboard and perfboard.
That's the funny thing! - I have both versions of most of the regular IC's i use (eg 555, 7hc595) in DIP and in SOP8/16, the idea was to avoid DIP completely lol (but yes I have several of those adapters, pretty useful, but i'll save them for more specialized IC's)
But you have come across them 
, i'll have to check them out now, thanks 
Check proto-advantage.com also.
They will buy SMD parts from digikey and install them on DIP adapters for you.
I've done that recently for some impossibly close pitch MSOP parts that I had no hope of soldering myself.
How about my Arduino prototype shield with a collection of handy SMD pads?
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/181191609710
SO-14 / TSSOP-14, SO-28 / TSSOP-28, 9x 0805 / 3x SOT26...
Schmartboard also makes many SMD options... including protoboards with hole spacing other than 2.54mm.
http://www.schmartboard.com/index.asp?page=products_th&id=279
And break apart DIP adapters...
http://www.schmartboard.com/index.asp?page=products_smttodip&id=448
Their first products were SMD carrier boards that were easy to solder
Nice! Thanks everyone
cjdelphi:
Nice! Thanks everyone
Have you looked into flower boards?
This is a nice putdown of a complex board:
"This is what a traditional wire-wrap board would pan out to look like. Have fun fixing an error on something like this, let alone find it, diagnose it, and reverse it."
This board has at least 20 chips on it, the number of connections made would not be possible without at least a 4 layer PCB, surface mount parts or otherwise.
As to fixing an error, an engineer would not have an issue with that. I would hazard to say this was a digital design with parallel busses, and some control lines, typical of late 80s-90s design before everything went serial. Data transfer rates were actually 16 times higher even, with 2 bytes of data being moved on the clock edges vs 1 bit with serial. I have an audio digital delay line effects box I made in fall 1985 that looks like this; it has 3 12-bit ADCs, 8 8-bit SRAM, 4 8-bit EEPROM, 3 12-bit DACs, timing control logic, 4 x 7 segment display, and input & output op-amps.
Here is a very complex 2560 based board I designed, 11 chips plus an RF module daughterboard (wrong caps were ordered & installed, assy house didn't think to call & ask about that), and a DC-DC module, 24V to 5V. Later converted to all SMD. It has a lot of serial interconnects - RS232, USB, RF -and is jam packed - no way that parallel interfaces would have fit on this board.
