Since many of your viewers may also feel that they are not expert solderers: You might benefit from a smaller soldering iron tip for this scale of work. Flux cleans oxide from the metal surface. It does not guide the solder. Surface tension, once the pad is "wetted" guides the solder. It is best to use rosin core solder. (DO NOT USE plumbing solder, which has an acid flux in it's core, rather than rosin. The acid is bad for electronics in the long run.) The rosin is flux, and, generally, makes the brushed on flux unnecessary unless you are trying to solder directly to copper. The silver color of the traces on your board is a plating (which is also called tinning in some circles) with a metal that does not oxidize easily. If you make your own boards and etch them yourself, you may well have bare copper traces, and liberal liquid flux is warranted, but you may want to finish by covering all of the traces with solder, to protect the copper from future corrosion and possible failure. Commercially made boards will almost always be tinned. Particularly if you are in a dry region or in an air conditioned lab, give thought to protecting the chip from static. Wrist straps are common in production settings, but I typically touch a ground point after picking up a too, and before picking up the chip, board, etc. Some are tempted to tape down the chip while soldering, but note that peeling the tape off later can produce quite a charge. Better to hold it down with a piece of conductive foam (DIP ICs often came with their pins shoved into such, I don't know where to get it today). Note that the chip leads need not actually touch the board conductors, they just have to be really close so that the layer of solder that will wick between them is thin so that you need not consider its resistance. It is quite possible to solder using only two hands. Leave the end of the solder sticking out from the roll, in mid air. Hold down the chip with one hand, positioning it as necessary. Pick up the iron, clean it on the wet sponge (yes, you should have one), then touch it to the end of the solder, picking up a very small droplet (small compared to the pin spacing), and touch the iron to the work so that it is in contact with both pin and pad. A key to a good joint is that both pieces being joined reach a temperature higher than the solder's melting point, when the surface tension will switch from forming a bead to adhering it to the pin and pad (it will flow in). You can reheat the joint, first pin soldered only, to re-position the chip so that all pins fall within the outline of their pads. Don't move anything for a few seconds after removing the heat, but don't blow on it. Now pick up the solder and solder a few other pins, diagonally opposite is a good choice, maybe doing the four corners. Good fresh solder joints should look shiny rather than dull. Don't worry about that for the first pin until you have a few others soldered, then go back and reheat it to make it shiny if it isn't. The key here is to avoid mechanical disturbance while the solder cools and solidifies. Remove the iron gently and hold still for a second or two. To this end you should not be pushing the pin down with the iron, since it will then move as the iron is removed, potentially spoiling the joint, but at least obviating the reason that you were holding it down. (If the pins don't all look like they're touching when you first hold the part against the board, use your needle nosed pliers to bend them in advance so that they are within a hair of touching or better.) There should be no pressure from the iron. The molten solder on the iron is the actual heat conductor. The iron should touch both pin and pad. If the solder does not flow onto both within a couple of seconds, let the part cool, clean the iron on the sponge, and add a little fresh solder to the tip and try again. Clean the iron on the sponge and re-wet it with a little fresh solder frequently. Avoid the temptation to put lots of solder on a joint. A big gibbous blob improves neither the electrical nor the mechanical quality of the joint. Don't rush: do just a few pins, then let the clip cool while you clean and "re-tin" the iron. If a joint doesn't look shiny, don't redo it right away, but come back to it 5 or 10 seconds later.

Great tutorial. We need more of this in the maker community. There's a ton of these SOIC packages MCUs from ST, NXP, etc that can be leveraged in simple low cost, low pin count designs.

Fantastic! Electronics has come so far so fast. Super easy to make almost anything one can think of these days.

Very good I’ll be implementing this project with schools across the north west thank you 👍🏿

Excellent tutorial! Clear and concise. Please do more micros!

Gary, back in the dark ages we used to glue SOIC's to the PCB. A quick zap of UV light to cure the glue, then onto the soldering stage. Thought the above may be of use to you. Enjoyed the video very much. J

Thank you for this complete instruction video!

Thanks dude, I cant tell how much you helped

Thank you. Use a smaller tip for the welding with temperature control maybe that will make soldering easier

Great content clear presentation. Thank you. More please

Very informative video. Easier to tin one pad, solder one pin to it, then solder another pin from the other side making sure all other pins are aligned, then fially solder all other pins. Tinning all pins first make the job harder.

The power bus (the whole bread board) is flipped in the drawing. Ground is on the the component in the drawing, and Positive is on the component side on real bread board.

Awesome! Thank you

*GARY!!!* *Good Afternoon Professor!* *Good Afternoon Fellow Classmates!*

Geeeeeee, and this little circuit kinda of started the Arduino revolution? thanks...:)

Great job!

Thank you so such for providing such content...

love this tutorial！

Interesting project 👍

Gary Explains . . . . very well

Thank you!! You the best

Your awesome.. lovely video sir

Dude I love this, can you do one for a microprocessor board please please? With is writing the boot program from scratch please

Amazing video. Thanks for this! Can you do such a video with STM32 to save camera data to SD card? Keep up the good work!

This video is really interesting! Thank you so much for sharing this version which is a new wolrd along the beautiful platform Arduino ❤

• Ah, so the bootloader on this chip is enabled by grounding a pin, rather than a delay in the start of the code! • I would have also like to see you use the Arduino IDE instead of LPCXpresso IDE, although NXP's IDE is really similar to the other enterprise IDEs (such as CodeVisionAVR for AVR chips). • Also, even though LPC812 seems to be easier to solder, I believe it's more expensive than ATmega328p. Granted that it's nicer than an ATmega328p in terms of clock speed and some other aspects. • Personally, I also hate those FTDI chips with a passion! Even though those seem to be really popular, in my experience they have proven to be much crappier (and expensive) than options such as CH341G and CP2102. • I would suggest to only solder pin #1 first, put the chip on the board and then position it, re-heat pin #1, solder pin #11, and then continue from there. I believe it'd be easier and more neat(er) since the chip would be flush to the PCB, and no pins will be under stress. • I'm like 20% sure that soldering the pin headers while they're in the breadboard, while easier to do so, could potentially damage the breadboard's plastic. I'm not really sure, but if someone were to ask me I would advise against it. • I believe the kind of soldering tip you're using is really not suitable for the job. You should use one that has a needle-like small surface to solder SMD components. Also, invest in a wet sponge or cleaning wire to clean the tip, it's really worth it! Nice job overall, Gary. I have made several Arduino-like boards from scratch, but I have never used an LPC812 so it was interesting to see your video!

We love you, Gary.

Excellent video. I'm glad that I'm the only one who doesn't have soldering skills.

When you solder the chip is better to put the tin on one pad only and solder this pad first. That way the chip will sit down on the breadboard correctly. After this initial operation will be very easy to solder the rest of the pads.

Decoupling capacitors should be as close as possible to the voltaje regulator and the microcontroller.

Nice! whats the power consumption of just the board? And can I use an external Oscillator?

To add to the professor's comment solder should not be put on the tip as this vauses the flux to be burnt off before you have soldered your joint as long as your tip is clean and you add your solder from the opposite side to the tip and you remove the tip as soon as the solder flows to the tip you will get a good joint provided you have had tip tip on both pad and and pin. The best tip I have found is a 3.2 mm chisel tip for normal sized components and reducing for smaller components a round tip in general does not work well. But has been said sucess comes from practice and a clean tip and board.

Smaller tip on the soldering iron would make it easier as well 🙈🙈

All that work to light up an LED Lol Awesome videos , thanks Gary :)

I think I will have to make a video on how to solder these chips on correctly!

Hi, Gary! Very nice video......... I want to design a custom controller PCB for a specific application. Can you recommend me some books or helping resources which would teach me in designing my own PCB and controller? Thanks a lot!

Fantástico

Thank you, it was a great video! However there was a small error in the circuit diagram you displayed in between the video. In those diagrams, the positive and the negative rows were flipped over (compared to what you did on the board)

Sir how can we use texas instrumentation MSP430FR6007IPZR chip to program and use it properly

Great

Hey Gary, great video! LOve to see someone design a 3.3 to 5 volt bidirectional adapter board. I have numerous projects that could be switched to Cortex from Arduino. I don't mean the small brds available now that just do a few pins. Thinking along the lines of a carrier brd.

It is far better to solder the chip to the adaptor board before you solder on the header pins. Also, you would find soldering a lot simpler if you kept the tip of your iron clean and tinned.

What about upgrade from LPC812 to LPC824 (LPC824M201JDH20)? The same package, similar price but more RAM and FLASH...

Do you have to tie unused pins to ground or Vcc?

Can you tell me where to go to research information on "micro PCB circuit boards" to make a micro controller for NES that works on NES original console/hardware. That has a ability to have direction on D-pad and/or buttons A/B to have auto-fire turbo capabilities? All the while working without the need for any external programs running on a PC like Joy2key, Rewasd etc....So basically all the turbo functionality is self-contained within the pad controller itself. Somone said something about altering the shift registers to produce turbo. How do I find info about that? Googling it does not really bring anything up but pre-made third party Turbo controllers and that is not what I am talking about.

Hi, how and why did you choose that MCU? Don't you have to do something with the FUSES? You didn't record any bootloader or firmware so I don't know if it's necessary. You did not use any hardware programmer, simply with a USB to TTL you can already record it, as in STM32. With so many MCU manufacturers and models, how do you choose?

Gary, you don't need to prep a PCB with flux before you solder. It's actually kinda counter intuitive to do that

Is it possible to turn this into a small game pad for pc? Sorry if this is a dumb question, I don’t know anything about this stuff. I can only code games.

Is this chip any more advanced than the Atmega?

Can this be further programmed by Arduino IDE? And also can it be used as Arduino UNO?

Curious why you used a 3.3V vreg if your pulling power from the USB to Serial board? Those USB to Serial boards have a jumper that lets you select 5v or 3.3v (at least mine does, and looks like yours does too), so the vreg shouldn't have been necessary...

A MUCH easier and more reliable method to attach the chip, and any SMD components, ESPECIALLY for beginners, is to NOT tin ALL the pads but just ONE! Ideally one corner pin then to solder that one pin whilst correctly orientating the chip using tweezers to push the chip flat to the PCB! Once the chip is correctly orientated and held firm by the one soldered pin, the rest of the pins can be soldered using flux and a soldering iron in whichever way you prefer ... drag solder or individual pin solder. DON'T forget to revisit the first pin and using flux, reflow the joint. This makes it MUCH easier to solder the chip in total without overheating or it moving around, as it will be held stable by the first pin soldered.

Is the "LPC810 CodeBase" boilerplate code to get going? Does the NXP needs bootloader?

Is there any reason not to recommend beginners use a solder paste syringe? It seems like a more fool-proof method.

Shouldn’t you put a voltage divider between the tx of the ftdi and the rx of the uc? Seem like you can put 5 volt on there and still fry your board...

I have an application where I need to take sensors that provide 5 different types of information, and using a micro-controller transmit the data (RF transmitter) to a recording system in such a way that the 5 types of data can be compared via time/date stamp to determine what the readings are at any given time. I have NO experience with micro-controllers. Any suggestions?

What about oscillator? We generally require a crystal oscillator in a MC. But we haven't used it here. Please explain.... 🤔

Dude solder paste. Paint it on the pads lay the chip on the pads heat it with a heat gun or something similar and watch the chip make one solid connection instantly without all this mess and time wasted. If you aren't steady enough to paint the paste on by hand get a thin piece of material and stencil the paste on.

Hey the ftdi programmer is at 5V.. It's TX pin will be at 5V logic which is connected to RX of uC.. programming the uC may damage its RX pin as at it is at 3.3V from the ldo.. am i missing anything?

Sir is that using same language as Arduino I couldn't get that ...😫

Flux alone should be more than enough to ensure that solder flows under those pads, I’ve never seen anyone else put gobs of solder on each pad before soldering an IC to it. I find RMA paste much more effective than no-clean. Also I don’t see why not make a PCB with a programming header on it. As is you’ve done no more than just taking the equivalent of a DIP20 MCU and slapping it on a breadboard with supporting components, which isn’t very versatile. The whole point of an arduino is that it has the programmer and the power supply and the indicator LEDs and the ICSP header and the oscillator built-in, and is a robust board with little to go wrong. A breadboard is not robust. Breadboards should be used for temporary circuits, for prototyping and experimentation. Wasting one by leaving a permanent circuit on it just increases the cost and the footprint of that circuit and makes it much more prone to wiring faults. Recently I needed to make a circuit with a raw MCU on it for space and power reasons, so I soldered a socket to some perfboard, along with a 16MHz crystal and caps, a programming header, reset buttons, and 5 status LEDs. Works great, I just have to plug it into my USBasp to program it through AVRdude. You could do the same thing but with dual-row pins soldered to it for breadboard use. Or even just solder some solid copper bodge wires atop your SOP20 adapter connected to some LEDs, reset button, linreg, and programming header. No need to have the USB programmer on the dev-board itself.

I know that there are a lot of soldering opinions, probably a different one for everyone who solders. The best way to find your inner solder master is to do a lot of it, watch other people, pick up tips and tricks, and then find your own technique based on trial, error, and oftentimes discovery inspired by moments of accidental cleverness. I come from the Jessa Jones/Louis Rossmann camp of thought that there is no such thing as too much flux but there definitely is such a thing as too little or the wrong flux. I use Amtech NC-559-V2-TF Tacky Flux 30CC as recommended by Louis and Jessa on a daily basis when repairing SMC boards at South City Computer in St. Louis - southcitycomputer.com I like how the Amtec is in a syringe for application and how its sticky and gooey and stays in place to fill gaps and spaces and tends to hold components in place a bit as the solder flows and gets sucked into the joint. Maybe I read it wrong but I disagree with another viewer here that the flux has little to do with the solder flowing. When I solder the flux definitely sucks the solder in. I learned this from a master plumber when I learned how to properly solder copper water lines like a professional ("if it don't leak it's right") before I got into board and component level electronics repairs but the principle seems to be the same. I also make my own flux with rosen dissolved in alcohol as inspired by another one of my favorite online teachers. Here is his lesson on making your own kzfaq.info/get/bejne/a85igbOcyeC2qY0.html. I find using liquid is better for reflow work, and for when I use chip quick or leaded solder to lower the melt temperature of existing silver solder joints before I wick when removing components like DC jacks or when I clean off pads. The homemade stuff has less residue and cleans up easier. Of course the proper tip, temperature, and "feel" for it comes into play. I appreciated your video though a lot and am interested in learning from you about the software side of things too, which you say you're better at. Don't be critical of yourself. If it works, it works :) I am really thrilled that there are so many people soldering now, even if they think they do it poorly and sharing what they do with the world. I should make some of my own project videos to give back. My hangup with that is my lack of confidence in my ability to make videos that don't suck :) Any tips and techniques or recommendations on overcoming that would be appreciated!

What a fantastic vid! Do you feel interested in working with us?:)

Gay i was thinking about build a raspberry using old Intel processor, its possible?

What programming language u used?

Or if you want compact, flexible and cheap get a NodeMCU.

Why didn’t you just order the DIL footprint instead of a breakout board

These comments, you would think this was where people come to publish books...

If you're adding flux to prevent the solder from sticking to the circuit board itself (and that does seem to be your intent given the many times that you say you only want the solder to stick to the metal bits) then you're wasting your time and flux. Solder will never stick to the circuit board itself no matter how hard you try to make it do so. Even with no flux whatsoever it simply is not going to stick to the board. I don't understand your desire to check continuity from the pins to the breadboard. At that scale you can quite easily see if a pin has solder on it or not. If it does then you have continuity. No need for getting your meter involved here. For best effect bypass capacitors should be placed as close as possible to the IC which they are protecting.

This chip is not as common as AVR atmegas / attinys.

Thats some of the most painful soldering ive ever seen, and ive seen some pretty horrific things.

what a flux are u using?

I like most of what is on your channel; not to say I do not like this one so much as I philosophically disagree. Your solution is not 'Arduino-like' at all. Arduino opened up physical computing to the masses in a time when microcontrollers were in the domain of serious academically-trained embedded programmers. The IDE was small, easy and full of helpful examples. Special programming adapters were not needed. While a FTDI serial adapter is cheap and easy to obtain nowadays; the Eclipse development environment that edits and compiles the code is a mind-numbing monstrocity for the novice to engage. I would think that the future of hobby and introductory educational microcontroller projects will be relying upon the abstraction of MicroPython or Circuit Python and the ease of just editing your higher level code in a simple editor and dropping it into the device as if it were a USB memory stick. Using Python it is relatively easy to pull data from the internet, talk to a variety of displays and read numerous sensors. Banging out code in ANSI C (or C++ without the helpful Arduino examples and libraries) will result in frustrated users who never move beyond blinking an LED.

Or you can buy for a few ?

Arduino, not Ardunio Gary!

100 comments ! xD

arduino is also few dollars

" like" is not so like. It does functions yes, but you lack half of the benefit with arduino. What makes it a success is that they have the library tools and programmer as well as the hardware and there are also full functional simulators, so why change from that to something else is not logical unless you already build specific chips and then you are unlikely to ise arduino

Hi, this is Hanna, I'm very interested in your channel. I'm writing to wonder if you're interested in demonstrating Coral Edge TPU hardware, doing some demo testing and review? I'm from Gravitylink, one of Google Coral's global distributors. We'd like to offer you one if you wanna try to show some demo testing on your channel. Looking forward to your reply! Thank you so much.

Nice, but its cheaper and easier to buy arudino clones.

I built several 'arduinos' and various 8052/51/32 and 6502 boards in the past, so i ll just skip this one :-)

Why bother when you can buy an Arduino Nano from China for $1.50

Does this micro not need an Xtal oscillator?

What is the gain in moving from Arduino to this new chip and all this different IDE etc. Big learning curve but for why?>