A flat board exists in two dimensions, but your circuit is destined for higher places.

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  • Soldering an ESP32 with a hot air gun

    Soldering an ESP32 with a hot air gun

    The ESP32-C6 microcontroller comes in a QFN32 package whose central ground pad cannot be soldered from the top with a standard iron. Instead, we describe how to use a hot...

    Soldering an ESP32 with a hot air gun

    The ESP32-C6 microcontroller comes in a QFN32 package whose central ground pad cannot be soldered from the top with a standard iron. Instead, we describe how to use a hot...

  • Custom SAMD21 dev board for I2C debugging

    Custom SAMD21 dev board for I2C debugging

    We present a custom SAMD21 dev board for debugging I2C sub-modules. The board is based around a SAMD21E18A ARM microcontroller, and hosted on a carnival W prototype board via a QFP32...

    Custom SAMD21 dev board for I2C debugging

    We present a custom SAMD21 dev board for debugging I2C sub-modules. The board is based around a SAMD21E18A ARM microcontroller, and hosted on a carnival W prototype board via a QFP32...

  • QFP/QFN32 crown with 0.5mm pitch is on the way

    QFP/QFN32 crown with 0.5mm pitch is on the way

    A new crown adapter for QFP/QFN32 packages with 0.5mm pad pitch is in production. This crown suits devices like the Espressif ESP32-C3 microcontroller, and Texas Instruments CC1120 RF Transceiver. Like the...

    QFP/QFN32 crown with 0.5mm pitch is on the way

    A new crown adapter for QFP/QFN32 packages with 0.5mm pad pitch is in production. This crown suits devices like the Espressif ESP32-C3 microcontroller, and Texas Instruments CC1120 RF Transceiver. Like the...

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surface mount component kits

These starter kits are tuned to get the most versatility out of a small number of component types. The components are supplied in translucent B5 ring binder pages, so will fit with the others as you expand your collection.

ritual prototyping boards

ritual prototyping boards have a 2-layer design with a ground ring, central power rails, left-right pin connectivity, and top and bottom paired signal lines. The signal lines are accessible via interleaved pads that make it easy to build most of the circuit with uninsulated wire and solder bridges. ritual boards are good for analog circuits with op-amps, timers, and lots of passive components.

See ritual prototyping examples for how common packages fit on the board, and how to use the signal distribution features. 

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festival prototyping boards

festival prototyping boards use an enhanced form of the ritual design, where four separate signal lines run along the top and bottom of the board. Signal lines are selected by soldering a short (2mm) piece of uninsulated wire from the signal pad to an adjacent distribution pad. This rich cross-board connectivity allows circuits to be build up in connected modules without needing jumper wires crossing left and right over the board.

carnival prototyping boards

carnival prototyping boards have a 4-layer design where the central pads are connected through to the back side of the board using vias-in-pads PCB fabrication technology. Once an IC is soldered to the front of the board, the matching pads on the back make it easy to route signals to the through-hole connections on the left and right. carnival boards also have top-bottom connectivity via opposing teeth. carnival boards are good for logic and microcontroller circuits where a large fraction of the IC pins will be connected to the through-hole headers.

primal prototyping boards

primal prototyping boards are a canvas to build free-form circuits, either for user interfaces or using oddly shaped surface-mount components that do not fit on the other boards. primal boards have through-hole connections of the same layout as the other boards so they can be easily stacked. The primal A boards have 50x50 mil pads, whereas primal X and Y have 100x50 and 50x100 mil pads respectively.

bones prototyping boards

bones prototyping boards provide the common 100x100 mil through-hole grid, interleaved with a second offset grid. The two grids combined support 100 mil pitch through-hole components such as switches and potentiometers, along with 50 mil pitch surface mount IC packages. bones K provides bread-board style connectivity with a central power rail, whereas bones X provides continuous signal lines in the X direction, to build backplane style circuits.

crown QFP adapters

crown QFP adapters adapt QFP32 and QFN16 packages to the standard 50mil SOIC format. The crown also provides connected distribution pads for each of the landings on the device footprint, which can be used to host decoupling capacitors and pull-up/pull-down resistors.

multipacks

Multiple board designs in the same pack. Be ready for all adventures.