Circuitbuilding Do-It-Yourself For Dummies®

Chapter 4. Building a Printed Circuit Board

Tasks performed in this chapter

• Building a through-hole kit

• Building a surface-mount kit

Nearly all electronic devices you can buy include one or more printed circuit boards (or PC boards). Luckily for the beginner, many kits are just right for learning how to use a PC board, like the through-hole kit learn-to-solder kit mentioned in Chapter 2.

There are two types of PC boards; through-hole and surface-mount. Components on a through-hole board have wire leads or terminals that extend through holes in the board, thus the name. Surface-mount boards, on the other hand, have no holes and the components are soldered directly to the copper cladding.

Note

Surface-mount technology (or SMT) components are much smaller than leaded components with wire leads (pronounced "leeds"), allowing the PC boards and the equipment that uses them to be much smaller than if through-hole boards are used. SMT components have either metal caps or very short leads designed to lie flat on the surface of the board. To the hobbyist, though, the components are much smaller than leaded parts and are harder to work with using regular soldering tools.

Note

Printed circuit board (PCB): A PCB is made from a core layer of insulating material such as fiberglass or plastic to which a thin sheet of copper (called cladding) has been attached on one or both sides. The desired pattern of conducting paths (called traces) is then printed on the copper. The PCB is then placed in a chemical ...