What do you guys do when you order SMD ICs by mistake?

[ExpAnonColin]

I swear, I was so careful not to get SMD, but you know how it goes... I want to breadboard these, do I have to put wires from every single one?  Or is there some little thing I could pick up at radioshack that would help me out?

-Colin

[Brian Marshall]

send them back!!!!

[idlefaction]

what i've done successfully in the past, is make a little fake DIP IC using veroboard and offcut component legs.  

say it's an 8-pin SMD IC, cut a 4x4 square of veroboard.  cut the tracks in the middle - i just used a hacksaw and sawed flat through the copper.  solder eight short pieces of leg into the outside holes, forming a kinda IC-looking thingy, with the copper side *up* and the legs pointing down about 5mm.  make the corner legs stick out the top about 5mm as well.

bend the SMD chip's pins 1, 4, 5 and 8 up in the air and solder the other ones onto the middle tracks.  bend the corner leg bits that are sticking up over, and solder to the SMD chip's legs that are bent up.  voila!    

i used it on some RMS-to-DC converter chips that i was going to use as envelope detectors, but they sounded awful.  (i blame my design - i'll revisit it one day.)

HTH!

[Ansil]

what chips are they..  anything usefull?

[ExpAnonColin]

They're ADC0804's. (if I can remember correctly I was going to use them for an analog to uber-lo-fi-digital circuit.  It was a while ago so I'm probably wrong).  I got 2 of them as "samples"...  thanks for the suggestion, idlefaction.

-Colin

[jimbob]

I did that a month ago w Mouser. I never called or sent them back but im sure theyd send you the right ones out if you call them soon enough. I should have but didnt. Mouser has helped a lot w other mistakes i have made in the past. There AWSOME!!!

[Peter Snowberg]

For 0.050" leads, I do much the same thing Idlefaction does, except I bend up every other lead and use two rows on either side of the chip body. An SOIC16 takes 4x5 holes.

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You can also get little PCBs from Mouser and other places called "Surf Boards" that fan out the tiny leads to nice big solder pads. RS sells something very similar for DIP chips.

Another option is to use the "dead bug" method. Bend every other lead up, glue the chip to a board upside-down, and use little pieces of #30 wire to jumper to the chip.

For anything smaller than 0.050" pitch leads, I go straight to professionally etched PCBs made using tin-over-copper plating.

Good luck with them! Set your iron to about 500, use a small tip, small solder, be careful, and you'll get by just fine.

Take care,
-Peter

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

It used to be difficult (and expensive!) to get surface mount to DIP converter boards, but now everyone is making them! HURRAH!!
including little boards you mount your SM chip on, and the legs go to a row of DIP pins, so you can mount the board a rightangles to the main board.
The robot guys use these a lot (high density!) and you see ads for them in Nuts & Volts mag (which is worth supporting, because maybe Steve Daniels will publish more stuff in it!)