Designing Electronics That Work | Hacker News Reader

Designing Electronics That Work

hscott.net

286 pointsteleforce115 comments

This is an interesting book. I've been in this space for years now and could easily see myself writing something like this, but I don't think it would look like this book.

I really don't like to see things like any sort of recommendation for use of n-propyl bromide. That shit's neurotoxic. The people who can use it safely will already know about it, know someone who knows about it, or find it on their own. Anyone who finds out about nPB here should not be touching it.

Unfortunately, many of the parts of the book that I've scanned are like that. There's a lot of prescription, not a lot of background/theory/underlying details, and no way to tell when the prescriptions are inapplicable or straight-up wrong. Which, often, they are: one of the hallmarks of deep experience is knowing when "the rules" are useful and when they're not, but what we have here is mostly rules. That will get your product out the door, I guess, but it's not going to level you up as an engineer, if that's what you're needing. Another example: stackups are discussed, but there's no mention of slash sheets, which is how you get things done cheaply and correctly. Specifying Rogers material for anything but the nastiest designs is just going to get your pockets drained and your Asian fab annoyed because they have to special order that. If you need it, sure, you need it... but can you get away with something more universal?

And then there's things like this: "Most SMPS datasheets will advise you on what bead to use and where to put it". Hahahaha no they won't. And if they will, there's a decent chance they get it wrong. Ferrite beads are so useful and so much trouble that you can't trust an IC datasheet to get it right, even if they want to do the same things you want to do. Which they might not!

If you're a more junior engineer trying to level up, give this one a look instead: Analog SEEKrets: https://www.eevblog.com/files/seekPDF.pdf

In general, people have to take a hazing at the certification lab before realizing something that "just works" is just not good enough.

There are a lot of different processes for manufacturing electronics, different DFM strategies, and choosing the right path is often a trade secret.

Usually made Jr staff read the NASA workmanship standards manual, cables and harnesses guide, and the tin whisker paper. Additionally, they would be expected to get their RF/ham technician license within the year, and practice coding test/boot-loader jigs in C/C++ in their assignments.

There is also a tacit discussion about Metrology that lasts on average 3 months if you are smart...

Book looks funny (AI slop?), as volume manufacturing is a different skill-set requiring designing to both a standard and factory capabilities. =3

> There is also a tacit discussion about Metrology that lasts on average 3 months if you are smart...

Man, EEs usually have zero clue about metrology. I worked on a big piece of T&M gear for a while. The looks I got when I said "so, we need to discuss how we plan to calibrate this thing" were... let's call them impressive. I don't think any other person on that project knew what a "traceable calibration" actually was.

It will probably not surprise you to learn that that project did not reach the finish line, at least not with my company.

Projects can be impossible with some environments, budgets, and teams.

Startup success rate is 1:22, and service companies survive 3+ years 6:1 against product companies... Thus, a hardware dependent launch has a 1:66 success rate over 3 years, and if people YOLO production it will go sideways for sure.

Best of luck =3

> I really don't like to see things like any sort of recommendation for use of n-propyl bromide. That shit's neurotoxic.

I don't even like to see recommendations for IPA (isopropyl alcohol). In 95%+ of the cases ethanol (ethyl alcohol) is just as good and is way less toxic than IPA.

There are two problems with ethanol, one practical and one stupid.

The stupid problem is that it's taxed heavily and thus is stupidly expensive. When not taxed it is probably denatured, but denatured with what? If you know the denaturant then you can use it with some degree of confidence. Methanol (methylated spirits) is acceptable in almost any technical application but is somewhat toxic, so for stupid reasons it is now rare. Denatonium benzoate is the other common denaturant, but it can leave annoying residues behind. Pick your poison (literally).

At one point in my career we had ready access to untaxed, undenatured, 200-proof absolute ethanol. So I used it a lot! Turns out it's significantly more aggressive than isopropanol, and can strip coatings or generally even dissolve things that isopropanol cannot. I don't use ethanol any more, I have better things to do with my life than figure out what it is and isn't going to dissolve.

I use 99.9% ethanol for electronics cleaning (not very frequently) and it leaves a white residue on some PCBs (e.g. JLCPCB ones?), but not all. It also seems more aggressive if I accidentally get it on my skin. Doesn't smell as bad as IPA though!

I haven't heard that IPA is much worse than ethanol though, beyond what's stated on Wikipedia ("somewhat more toxic"; ethanol is obviously toxic as well). Should I be more concerned about using IPA?

> Should I be more concerned about using IPA?

Not really. The entire planet was rubbing it on their hands for years during the pandemic. It'll dry your skin out, sure, if you're getting a lot of it on your skin, but you shouldn't be if you're not using it as hand sanitiser, and of course you're not drinking it.

Here in Argentina we never used isopropanol in our hand sanitizer, just ethanol. I suspect most other countries are the same.

Personally I am not really concerned about any toxicity differences between ethanol and isopropanol. As the sibling comment says, they're both widely used in hand sanitizer. At the exposure levels present in electronics work, and compared to the other stuff that's going to be around, it doesn't seem worth worrying about to me.

The white residue is a separate problem. Alcohols are not perfectly effective at dissolving all the components of flux residue, so you often get white crud left over. It's harmless, but ugly, and sometimes you just need a clean joint. I think it is possible to get this stuff off with alcohol and some skill, but who has time for that? Just buy proper flux remover.

The best flux remover I know of is MicroCare SuprClean or PowerClean (they're very closely related, but definitely at least a little different; either way it's hard to tell them apart, so go for whatever's convenient). It is supposedly nontoxic (but remember they once said that about the last flux remover that got banned... and the one before that... and...), readily available from the usual places here in the US, and very, very powerful. Careful cleaning with it will not leave any white residue behind. (Careless cleaning will lead to the observation that flux remover solvents dissolve soils... which means the soils are right there to be redeposited should the solvents evaporate... so you have to actually manage to get the crud off the board if you want it clean. Dissolving alone is not enough!)

I haven't done an exhaustive survey of flux removers, but this stuff certainly does the trick. I was originally looking for something that could dissolve Krytox residues (long story) and while I thankfully never had cause to test it, this stuff is based off some member of the Vertrel family, which is one of the few things in chemistry capable of that job. And anything that can even threaten Krytox is probably a tool worth having!

Occasionally I will "wash" dirty PCBs by spraying them with 50% ethanol, 50% water, then drying them with an air gun or the like to get the water off in a reasonable time.

Nearly any properly designed board will not hold residual voltage for long when disconnected from power, so the slight conductivity of tap water is a non-issue.

IPA is the main ingredient in many brands of hand sanitizer. I'm really not concerned about the risks involved with using a couple of millilitres of the stuff to remove some flux residue - I'd be more concerned about exposure to the flux.

>I don't even like to see recommendations for IPA (isopropyl alcohol).

Even worse, I've seen people recommend h2o. You can drown in that shit.

A: Getting ethanol is tricky. Lab Alley is the only supplier I've found that will sell it to individuals. Lab suppliers will sell if you have the right business paperwork in place, but will usually attach a huge hazardous shipping fee due to the flammabililty.

You can get Isopronaol on Amazon.

B: Isopropanol isn't that toxic. Much less so than methanol, for example.

McMaster Carr now sells ethanol in large quantities.

I just looked - only see denatured: https://www.mcmaster.com/products/ethanol/denatured-ethyl-al...

You may pay more for it, but "culinary solvent" is what you want to buy if you are trying to get it as an individual. It's pure food grade ethanol.

It's still tricky most places in the US -- you will likely have to jump through hoops to pay taxes and/or get the license to purchase, depending on your state's rules. I agree that IPA is not enough of a concern to actually justify it in my mind.

Isopropyl alcohol... toxic?

Funny to see IPA called "toxic". In aircraft manufacturing it's considered the nice and friendly solvent in comparison to the stout stuff like MPK or MEK, and considerable effort is invested in convincing workers to use it when the big guns aren't needed. Or, natch, to get workers to wear gloves when working with solvents.

(Much discourse on industrial safety casts corporations as the bad guys, with considerable evidence, but it is still the case that much safety equipment is bulky or unpleasant to use. Ketone-proof gloves are thicker and less pliable than latex gloves, which is no small consideration when doing fine work under time pressure. Easier to just wear two layers and change the outer glove when it starts to break down. When do you know it's breaking down? When you feel it leaking through. When you feel that, doesn't it mean you're already getting skin contact with the solvent. Well, yes, but....)

MEK has the distinction of being the only material I know of that was simultaneously on both the FDA's "generally recognized as safe" food ingredients list and the EPA's "hazardous air pollutants" list, for which no safe emissions level is recognized. It did eventually get removed from the second.

As far as I know, there has never been a fatality attributable to MEK exposure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methyl_ethyl_ketone#Health_eff...

Analog SEEKrets: https://www.eevblog.com/files/seekPDF.pdf

Neat, thanks for the link. Unusual combination of mathematical and practical notions in that one.

> This is advanced material, which assumes that you have fully understood earlier courses. If not, then go back to those earlier texts and find out what you didn’t get.

Is this PDF part of a course series? Or the 'earlier texts' mean prerequisites gotten elsewhere?

My impression of it is that it's basically perfect to hand to fresh or about-to-be-fresh EE graduates. It fills in some of the massive practical gap between what's taught in college and what you actually need to know to be an effective engineer. So I interpret that as "this builds on your degree".

Of course, it's much more applicable than that, but it is not trying to be a from-basics textbook. Which is good, because there are lots of those, and there are very few things that teach what this teaches.

I flagged this entry because it looks like a marketing stunt.

The description of the book was looking appealing, and I was amazed at the good spirit to have a free downloadable version.

So I opened a new tab for the free and paid versions, because I was curious to see the inside but interested to have a hard-copy.

But then, on one side you arrive on a page that says that the digital copy is "sold out"... lol... sold out. And on the other side, the hardcopy page says that it is not for sell anymore as a new version will arrive and here is a link to "pre order". And the funniest is that this link to nostarch does not even work...

My guess is that the author learned a hard lesson that really only content creators can learn:

If you offer something that is payment optional and on an anonymous basis, 95%+ of people will take it for free. It doesn't matter how virtuous your audience speaks, if you are going to offer something for free and it's not face-to-face, almost no one will pay you.

Might be that he hasn't actually written the book yet. Once he has enough pre-orders, he can get financing and can hire a ghost writer to write the book.

> I flagged this entry because it looks like a marketing stunt.

He published this version in 2021. He's working on a second edition coming out later this year with No Starch. I suspect he had meant to take down the older PDF a while ago and the surge in interest yesterday from here reminded him it was still up.

https://nostarch.com/designingelectronics

I've begun playing around with "hardware design" recently and it's very humbling. I've been developing software for a long time, and I have a good amount of experience designing and making physical objects, both manually (well, with tools, but manually guided/used) and via digital means (mostly FDM).

Making even a simple electronic device is a journey to say the least. The intersection of code and mechanism is a fascinating area to play in, but from PoC to Product, the amount of effort, expertise and iteration is hard to imagine until you try.

Thanks for sharing your experience, looking forward to leafing through the pdf for some valuable insights.

I had the same experience. Eventually I think the next time I'm going to try something extremely simple, like a button that triggers some pre-recorded noise.

"That was not easy"

yeah, but did you properly debounce that button, to not end up with multiple triggering events per button-press?

Many many years ago I got to hear the founders of Fitbit come in and give a lunchtime chat about their journey. It was utterly fascinating to hear all the challenges, as a software engineer, you never even think to consider. Things like their attempts to optimise the layout of components effectively doubled the production cost because it would require someone to flip the PCB. Or that the adhesive used to temporarily keep the case attached to a tiny spindle during assembly was slightly too tacky, the residue of which would many months later cause stress fractures on the case and a whole raft of warranty replacements.

Hardware is hard.

It is not "hard" after some practice, but you need to be willing to learn.

In general, DFM is a specialized area most EE have zero training in unless they chose to study it as an option.

John Shive's Wave Machines is where every student should start:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DovunOxlY1k

Remember to have fun =3

Get a ham radio technician license, and you may develop an intuitive perspective on most electrical engineering concepts.

Install LTSpice (free from Analog Devices), and head here to run down the basics of simulation (for software guys it will quickly make sense):

https://www.youtube.com/@FesZElectronics/videos

Analyze all schematics in the encyclopedias, and build some of these simple projects:

https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofelectroniccircuits...

Try to combine various aspects of the designs into something you find useful.

Avoid digital mcu cheat codes in favor of 555 at first, as you will learn more.

Note: burning parts with design mistakes is part of the learning process, but reverse engineering mistakes to understand why is the fun part.

Best of luck, =3

Hardware has a way of humbling even the most experienced software devs

It's almost like hardware design is its own discipline! Kidding aside, yes, hardware design is its own discipline and hardware design is hard even for hardware engineers. Hardware troubleshooting is its own distinct discipline. Design for manufacturing, and supporting hardware through manufacturing are also their own disciplines. With issues from China practices pushing that last one to new heights.

A realistic trajectory that will be challenging enough is building (and troubleshooting) low frequency or simple microcontroller kits; HAM radio introduction stuff (also troubleshooting some); personal designs and lab at school; then junior time in a professional setting. Jumping into a design with the goal of having it be manufactured is not impossible - if you like a challenging hobby - but it's a hobby first.

If you want your electronics to work:

1. Read the datasheets for everything and follow all restrictions, like on safe operating area (SOA), in regard to current and ambient temperature and so on. Use appropriate heat sinks.

2. Unless you have good reasons or confidence coming from somewhere, do not stray far from the example circuits in the datasheet. If they call for certain decoupling capacitors, have those. If something has a minimum and/or maximum load impedance, be in that limit (same as point 1).

3. Do not design anything to depend on the performance of an individual part, in regard to some performance parameter that has lots of variance in mass production of those parts. This is particularly a problem for analog components; e.g. current gain of bipolar transistors and such. In simulation, play with variances in part values to see how sensitive it is; you can choose tolerances accordingly. Maybe some resistors need only 5%.

4. Good PCB layout and so on. Careful breadboard work. Proper soldering practices. Solid power supply circuits operating well within their capacity range. Proper grounding. Safety devices: fuses, diodes, etc.

4b. If the datasheet provides a sample PCB layout, use it. If you have no idea what kinds of issues that PCB layout is potentially addressing - then you also are not competent to troubleshoot these issues in your own different layout.

Solid advice... especially the part about not relying on individual part performance.

Apparently the ebook has “sold out” so this is just marketing for the new paid ebook preorders.

Well, that's some lying doublespeak if I've ever seen it. Hopefully someone reading this has access to some kind of machine that can duplicate a PDF file, thus putting an end to the shortage.

Well, the author did specifically say that the reason it's no longer free is because others have worked on the book and want to get paid. That being said, this is literally just an ad, especially because they did not keep the old version free.

I wonder if on the first page it says:

Hardware is a money pit so be sure to be motivated by passion more than profit.

I'm kidding, but only sort of.

You kid, but; from the supply-side perspective, when I graduated 15 or so years ago in Electronic Engineering, job options in the field weren't great, and salaries were much lower than I'd been led to believe they would be, with much harder work and more numerous hoops to jump through than going into the software field.

I had been passionate about programming since single-digit age and decided to go into that field and am now an experienced developer of 15 years, starting client-side on "modern" smart phones (early Android, iOS and even Windows Phone), eventually moving to back-end where I've found my home.

That said, I do still love electronics, and a book like this could probably help refresh my memory of much that I learned back then so I can get deeper into electronics for fun. Much of what I have done since university has only been tinkering, prototyping on veroboards etc, lots of MCU stuff, and the usual sort of build/repair of electronics you'd expect of someone with a cursory understanding.

At some point I'll probably want to be designing/building my own PCBs; that's become a lot easier than it was back then when OSHPark was the only real contender, so I didn't get beyond some very basic PCBs with just a handful of components on a single or double layer back then; but this will be for "fun" and personal projects where I want something custom but more polished.

I've never looked back when it comes to the Electronics as a career (profit) and I'm happy with that, but I would very much like to make use of those skills I did learn to a greater extent than I have (passion).

Yeah it's sad because hardware is mostly competing with software for talent nowadays (EE degree's are easily acceptable for SWE work), and software work just blows EE work out of the water on pretty much every front. I cannot see right now how electronics in the US has a viable path forward, everyone in the industry who knows what they are doing is pushing 65-70 with almost no fresh blood taking the $75k/yr electrical engineering jobs to learn the craft.

The pay is low because the margins are low, and the margins are low because...hardware is a money pit. The only reason I am here is because I have a passion for hardware that I don't get from software.

It seems the hard copy is out of print, and they are sold out of the “free” digital downloads.

I would love to see a book called "designing electronics for a person who has never touched electronics"

“The Art of Electronics” by Hotowitz and Hill?

looked it up, as a guy who knows very little about electronics, it is still an extremely complicated book. It ll be the equivalent of asking a guy who has never jogged more than a mile to climb mount everest. There has to be atleast one author in the world who has truly written a book taking absolute noobs into account for electronics and slowly but steadily taught them complex and practical ideas. This author is someone who introduces jargon only after explaining the concepts in the most non jargonish way possible

Sorry, didn’t mean to mislead you. Just remembered that this book helped me to get the basics pretty well when I was at the high school, but that was around 25 years ago, so my memories might be wrong that it was a “basics” material.

Forrest Mims books were great for me as a kid who wanted to learn about electronics. I'd recommend Getting Started In Electronics, which you can still buy new. There's a copy on archive.org, but I'd recommend getting a copy.. the hand-written notebook format is much nicer in the book than it is here in scanned form. https://archive.org/details/getting-started-in-electronics/m...

That would be a fantastic resource!

I have this book called "Practical Electronics for Inventors". It starts from absolute basics, but it's also very comprehensive.

https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Electronics-Inventors-Fourt...

seems a lot better than the art of electronics but it is still not quite there yet. It has to introduce ideas one by one without overwhelming the newbie and it has to start from absolute zero to the point where you can build a microcontroller or something

I've been doing some analog PCB layouts for the first time recently, it's the one thing I wish there were better resources on (going from schematic to layout). Even the best YouTube vids are mostly simple digital stuff with very few components.

The page contains a link that says "If you want to get a copy, you can download a digital copy for free." Clicking this link either asks you to name a price (for something you haven't yet had a chance to evaluate) or takes you to a page that either has no actual .PDF download link, or has hidden it well enough to turn it into a puzzle.

Either way, not an ideal first impression. Designing electronics that work is a lot like designing a web page that works: even if it doesn't end up simple, it should almost always start out that way.

You can type in a price of 0, then it asks for your email and it takes you to a PDF download page.

As much as I appreciate the author's effort, if I have to enter my email to get the "free" book, then the book is not free.

Lots of free things require identifying yourself, like healthcare.

Those, just like this free book, are still free.

Healthcare has expectations of privacy, legally enforceable. Random insert-email-here has expectations of a scale of getting spammed to getting fucked out of your online identity.

"If I have to enter my email to get the 'free' book, then the book is not free" was the original assertion. I missed the implied footnote about privacy expectations.

You pay, personal information and lost time is the currency.

"If I have to show my card to get into Costco, the free samples aren't free"

No it doesn't. Looks like it's been removed because of the pending second edition, which will no longer be free.

Maybe the author changed something. But when I saw the link, I put in $0 and my email and I received a PDF download link.

Mmh all you hate to do is enter 0 for the price and click on the huge pink button to get the pdf

Mmh, OK, I'm sure I'll get around to it eventually.

Once you do that you still have to put in your email address. That's where I bounced off of it for now.

Lord Jesus F Christ. The author writes a complete electronics book and gives it away for free, and your entitled rectum moans about having to type $0 to get it for free?

Look, the flow is stupid and broken, he's not complaining about typing the $0. I had the same issue. It's a gumroad thing I think.

Again. It's stupid and broken. Not entitlement

While it does come off as self-entitled, it is worth considering that there are a lot of people in the world who are competing for our attention. Sometimes legitimately, sometimes not. Even in the legitimate cases, it is enough to overload most people.

Perhaps it is better to make the point using more considerate words, something to the effect of: hey, we should be thankful that the author is providing the option to get the book for free.

It's not about the book's merit or its price, it's about good faith. Bushwhacking the reader with unexpected hassles won't make them feel good about clicking the link, "free" or not.

Yes. Think of it as a CAPTCHA. There’s a reason.

Okay, I'm one among the many users who experienced this exact same thing, and Gumroad seems to indicate this variant is 'Sold Out' and doesn't let me get anything by typing $0 (or any other number for that matter).

The book is available on Z-Library by cursorily searching for the Title of the book. Sigh. Hope the author fixes this by putting it on GitHub (or) removing the link to the Gumroad site that doesn't work.

I would really like to purchase a hard copy. The hero picture of the book is enticing. Looks like it's not available right now sadly.

I own a hard copy of the book. It's very valuable as a survey to speed run getting over "Peak of Mt Stupid", crossing "Valley of Despair", and beginning the climb of the "Slope of Enlightenment".

Nice work Hunter! I’m starting a hardware side project so I’ll definitely be giving the book a read. Hopefully it helps me avoid some of the common electronic pitfalls.

The web site says the digital copy us free, then links to another web site that says it is no longer free.

Scam?

Trying to buy a physical copy. It says "This product is not currently for sale." Would love to buy this.

might it be because the author is making a new version for no starch press?

https://nostarch.com/designingelectronics

You knocked it out of the park with the cover! I'll definitely be grabbing a physical copy because of that.

This looks great! Exactly the kind of practical knowledge that is hard to come by.

Maybe (2021) should be added to the title?

I bought and read this, would recommend.

"The Art of Electronics" is the classic in this area.

This seems entirely more digestible than AoE though. Don't get me wrong, I've read that book probably 6 times over in my life - it's fantastic- but it's a university text book. This new book seems aimed at simply getting a product out the door, which is a different but useful niche.

Indeed, and it was written for the typical electronics course that's part of the undergraduate physics curriculum, which is how I encountered it in the early 80s. A year later they switched to a different text because AoE was too hard.

I don't think I've ever met an engineer who used it in college. Except it might be like Messiah's quantum mechanics book -- something you read after you already understand the subject matter. That's why the second through sixth readings are the best. ;-)

But I think the physics students were learning electronics for a different purpose, to support laboratory research, which depends heavily on electronics. The course was expected to be accompanied by a lab, and we had a lot of chances to learn about making and breaking things throughout our degrees. Maybe the electronics course helped us figure out which ones of us became experimentalists, or theoreticians.

And both Electronics and manufacturing were also much more primitive in those days. Real products were closer to our hacked-together prototypes than they are today.

> I don't think I've ever met an engineer who used it in college.

Hey, I did! And I had to teach out of it... that was an experience. (I distinctly remember pulling it out in class one day, as a TA, to show the students a figure that was particularly good... and got yelled at by one kid because "that's not our book" and "we shouldn't have to read that". Even the other kids rolled their eyes at that one.)

It really is a text that's made for physicists and hacker-types. There is a ton of great information on building one-offs and prototypes. Not so much for getting products out (so. many. trimmers.).

Indeed, these days code is the new trimmer. ;-)

If you click through to the FAQ this is addressed:

"How is this different from The Art of Electronics?

The Art of Electronics is a wonderful book, but doesn't contain a lot of information about the design process. It's mostly theory, which is important, but is missing a lot of the information that I ended up learning the hard way. The Art of Electronics makes a wonderful companion to Designing Electronics that Work."

Art of Electronics is a 1000+ page textbook and the X chapters add 500 on top of that of circuit theory. This is a 310 page guide on project management and practical application as it relates to electronics.

They are complimentary literature, not competing. Also AoE is not cheap.

Thanks for this!

> Sold out, please go back and pick another option.

Funny how a "free" PDF book can be sold out.

Wow

> To give you an example of the cost of getting full FCC approval, a company like UL will charge around $15,00-$20,000

I hate typos like these

What is the typo? UL is an accredited lab for FCC certification. When we did CE certification we went to TUV who provides the lab needed to do those tests (at an even more eye-watering cost, which you have to pay again if you fail).

15,00 instead of 15,000

And it doesn't even make sense. UL has nothing to do with FCC approval.

https://www.ul.com/services/fcc-testing-and-certification

Thanks, TIL. UL is traditionally associated with safety testing.

Please do not use leadless parts. Please do not use parts smaller than they need to be. Please make your BOM perfect. Please make your silkscreen perfect. Thank you.

Leadless parts are getting more and more common, it saves board space

You can only check them with an x-ray machine. The only way to rework them is with hot air. They suck, suck, suck for (DFM), design for manufacturing. Always try to design with leaded parts if you can. They can be fixed with a soldering iron.

Board space isn't the only consideration, by far. You don't need .4mm pitch BGAs on a giant pcb with acres of empty space either.

PCBs are not built at the north pole by little magic elves.

BGAs and LGAs are the devil, sure. But anyone who can't handle QFNs and DFNs has no business calling themselves a modern electronics shop.

(Regular QFNs, I mean. Dual-row QFNs are sick jokes, and I maintain that triple-row QFNs are just figments of my nightmares, and I won't listen to anyone who says otherwise.)

I will give you this anecdote: I find BGA easier to solder than QF[N|P]. Most soldering errors I make are due to inappropriate amount or uneven solder application. No factor if the solder is pre-applied.

In production manufacturing solder paste is generally applied to BGA pads. The amount of solder in the balls is less than the ideal amount for making a good joint, and the solder paste also helps to hold the component in position.

That said, I have ‘successfully’ soldered small BGA components by just applying a sticky flux and then reflowing with a hot air gun. It can work fine for prototypes, but it’s not really how the packages are meant to be soldered.

Good info. I forgot about the flux... Concur. I had trouble without flux, but relative ease with. Haven't tried paste on the pads.

Plate + air works better than air alone IMO.

At scale though the cost of the board space outweighs the problems with manufacturing

Unfortunately cheap accelerometers are invariably leadless.

I don't know why such a common part still can't be assembled reliably on the usual cheap one click services... But I spent several days chasing that error, thinking it must have been my design....

How do you plan to manage RoHS compliance (a topic the book covers) with leaded parts? Only build things that fall into the ever narrowing exemptions?

Any new electronics guide needs to be recommending lead free by default. It's been clear where things are headed for years.

I think they mean lead as in IC pins (as opposed to BGA balls or QFN pads), rather than lead as in the toxic metal Pb.

Wow, this looks very interesting and educational. Thanks!

Also, I'm certainly no designer, but I wonder if it hadn't looked better if the title had been laid out like:

    Designing
    Electronics
    That Work

rather than (as now):

    Designing Electronics
    That Work

Is there any particular reason behind this (to me) off-balance design, like some kind of deeper connection with the content of the book? Or do I just lack taste and imagine things?

Edit: actually praise the effort, since it looks really cool.

just what everyone loves to receive when announcing they published a book, unsolicited advice on the cover from an anonymous person on the internet.

The typsetting looks good. Balance is a matter of taste, unless you can really see the designer didn't have the eyes for it.

This design works, say I as a former freelance designer with hardcore typographers education.

You could read it like a subtitle.

"Designing Electronics (that work)"

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