So I had a bit of spare time today and decided to go about soldering a MappyDot by "hand".

Just bung on a bit of solder paste, place the components:

Place in the reflow oven:

Fire that sucker:

Bish bash bosh:

Oh wait....

Well that didn't go too well. A couple of components have jumped pads (bottom right) and the VQFN is bridged. A bit of hand soldering and a microscope will fix this no problems, but that's a pain.

The reason all this doesn't go to plan so easily is that excess solder will flow and displace everywhere when it has nowhere to go, causing solder bridges and components to move.

So in comes the solder stencil to get the right amount of solder per pad. In Eagle you can export a solder stencil to a laser cutter by editing the document to show only the dimension and cream layers:

Then change the tCream layer's fill style:

Since this is a single sided board, we just show the tCream layer, which will net (hehe) something like this:

You can then print this straight to a laser cutter, or export to DXF which can be used to cut with. Unfortunately this will have to wait until later in the week as I don't have the wife approval to splurge on a laser cutter. In the meantime, I will fix this board up under the scope and get it running.