Dave & Bruce,
Thanks for the SMD tips. I've already got a toaster oven (with homemade controller) to do reflow. That parts covered.
Got decent tweezers so I'm OK there.

I just need better eyes!

I've tried the headband magnifiers and haven't liked them much. It seems like the depth of focus wasn't very good and unless my head was just the right distance from the work then it wasn't focused. Maybe I just need better ones?
Right now I do my work under one of the magnifying lamps with the fluorescent tube around it, but that's not really ideal either. It's in the way a lot.

I think a good lab microscope may be my next adventure...

Dave, who's laughing at your Intel Play microscope? Not me! I already bought a Aven "Mighty Scope" for inspection. Up to 200x magnification...
http://www.weirdstuffwemake.com/swee...scope_0863.jpg

It gets in pretty close. The resistor in the lower right is 0603.
http://www.weirdstuffwemake.com/swee...closeup_01.jpg
Great for inspection, but it doesn't really respond quickly enough to work under "in real time", so I still need...something... else.


Anand,

I'm sorry I highjacked your thread to ask about SMD. But since Bruce brought up 0402 sized parts I just *had* to ask.

The question I'm wondering about, considering the *very* modest range requirement, would I need to modulate the Debugout signal, or just feed it to the MOSFET driving the coil every few 100s of ms (the rest of the time the coil wouldkeep getting its 32 KHz for power transfer).
I doubt you'll need to modulate the signal. I'd just stuff the signal direct into the MOSFET and I'll bet it works fine.
Certainly you could do IR too, but I don't see any reason why you can't couple the data through your transformer.
I'm looking forward to photos of the finished product in action.


steve