Have you found a chip for your project, only to have to make a PCB for it?

This poll is embedded within Round-Up and Review - What's Happening?

Have you tried to look for an evaluation board or micro-controller or otherwise to work as part of your project, only to discover you need to flesh out more of a solution and design a printed circuit board for it before you can use it?

Top Comments

michaelkellett over 5 years ago +2

I don't expect to find or use evaluation boards as part of a project. I use them occasionally but in the end things usually need their own board. MK
koudelad over 5 years ago in reply to michaelkellett +1

I agree that in the end you usually need your own board. However, I have noticed at work that we were bitten a few times because of not using a single component evaluation board. We than had to shave off…
Fred27 over 5 years ago +1

I took the question to mean "have you ever wanted to use a part that had no evaluation board available" - i.e. you had to jump straight to a design without the dev board prototype stage. I have always…

charlieo21 over 5 years ago

Sometimes it's better to make your own board because you have many chips and circuits interconnected that you have to use a lot of wires to connect all the evaluation boards and you have many wire problems. So at the end, you have to design your own board.
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dougw over 5 years ago

I have even been forced to design a PCB for an element 14 design challenge when one of the kit of supplied parts was a tiny 2 mm SMT chip.
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Gough Lui over 5 years ago

Sometimes when you get desperate, you might try dead-bug style approaches ... soldering thin wires to pads on a package ... etc. I know I've done that at least once, because the turnaround for a PCB can be quite a bit if you don't want to pay for rush service.

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Fred27 over 5 years ago

I took the question to mean "have you ever wanted to use a part that had no evaluation board available" - i.e. you had to jump straight to a design without the dev board prototype stage. I have always found something that similar enough to prototype with even if the final board used a different part from the same family.
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koudelad over 5 years ago in reply to michaelkellett

I agree that in the end you usually need your own board.
However, I have noticed at work that we were bitten a few times because of not using a single component evaluation board. We than had to shave off all the components from the final product to make sure the power consumption (or communication etc.) is not influenced by any other component on the board.
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michaelkellett over 5 years ago

I don't expect to find or use evaluation boards as part of a project.
I use them occasionally but in the end things usually need their own board.

MK
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