At some stage you will have to work with surface-mount devices (SMDs) and solder them by hand. You can wait until you are forced to learn, or you can leap into the fray with gusto and abandon. At some ...

Should folks building small numbers of circuit boards use surface-mount parts, or should they stick with through-hole components that are so much easier to handle and solder (not to mention see)?

If you are lucky enough to encounter a piece of homebrew electronics from the 1950s, the chances are that under the covers the components will be assembled on solder tags, each component with long ...