[dakotart1984]

One way of soldering the Ic's I havent seen shown is the method I learned while working for panasonic. Its quite easy and is relatively quick, and looks very clean after completed. Basically you get some liquid flux, dillute it 70/30 with alcohol because initally it is entirely too sticky. Then place the component down with tweezers and put a small dab of solder on the tip of the hot iron. Place a bit of solder on one of the corners and dont be afraid to flood the pins next to it, thats the objective. Repeat the process for the adjacent corner. Then take the liquid flux and put a drop or 2 on the side you are working with. Starting at the corner with the bead of solder work your way down the legs of the chip dragging the bead of solder to the other side. If you have too much solder at the end use some desoldering braid and take a tiny bit off and go across the legs again with more flux if needed. Repeat the process for each one of the sides and use some heavy duty flux cleaner, alcohol bath, or other pcb cleaner to clean after all the components are done. Once complete I fooled a supervisor in thinking that the board was done by a machine! good luck and if this is helpful ill make a tutorial on how to do it.

 

[MisterX]

That is referred to as "the paste and wipe method"

http://www6.head-fi.org/forums/showp...&postcount=132

 

[dakotart1984]

Thanks misterx, although Id say tho that liquid flux makes this MUCH easier, and cleaner to work with.

 

[pipp]

pcm chips arrived today, just awaiting bords. Man these are small, I'm so not looking forward to solder this. I'w done pcm2706 before but I'm imagening these are smaller, witch they probably arnt. Well it usualy works out

 

[Mazuki]

I got a quick question. So I bought the Hammond enclosure for the AlienDAC. The problem is the board isn't as long as the enclosure, therefore there's no way to prevent the board from sliding fom one side to the other. This is bad because the USB jack is on the board itself.

Is there any way to secure the board without having to drill from the bottom of the case? That would ruin the aesthetics.

 

[tomb]

Look back earlier in the thread (yep - pretty long now). MisterX had a solution where he cut out another piece of plastic to fill the rest of the slot, and a piece of foam to cushion between the boards ... or something like that. (If I got it wrong, he'll probably correct me.

)

 

[steinchen]

simply cut off a piece from a sheet of aluminum or a perfboard to fill the empty space

 

[kklee]

I used a less elegant solution, but it worked for me. I epoxied a small nut inside the case to act as a stopper to hold the PCB in pace. The trick was getting the nut to stay in the right place and keeping it there until the epoxy set.

 

[Mazuki]

Thanks for the responses guys, I got a piece of thin useless perfboard. That should do the trick.

 

[dhp]

it appears that I have a problem. Right channel outputs ~1 mV, and left channel outputs 100 mV. What could possibly cause this? Can't be the soics or the ssop can it?

 

[pddjsteve]

I used my first and only failed attempt, cut the partially populated board down to about 2/3, and put it in as a spacer

 

[pegasus21]

The BUF634U is only used for configurations where the power supply will be shared with an amplifier right? For all other configurations it's not needed?

 

[Alf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by pegasus21 The BUF634U is only used for configurations where the power supply will be shared with an amplifier right? For all other configurations it's not needed?

This is correct

 

[n_maher]

Well, looks like SMD stuff is out to get me lately. Got the DAC populated yesterday afternoon and decided to try it today. No joy. It might serve as a nice space heater but as a DAC it's no good, the chip gets seriously hot within 2 or 3 seconds of plugging it into the computer.

My USB is putting out a steady 5.07VDC but upon plugging in the DAC the led does not light, the 3V3 pad reads 1.07VDC and the 5V pad reads .75VDC. Any thoughts or suggestions before I throw this thing in the can?

I was pretty obsessive about checking for shorts on the DAC chip to the point of taking high-res macros of the chip and the only short that I could find was between pins 1 and 2 and MisterX seemed to think that was ok. And the rest of the assembly went without issue.

Coming soon to the for sale forums near you, a complete Alien DAC parts and PCB package

...

Nate

 

[psilosome]

I would guess you have a short between +3.3V and ground (which are connected to those two pins as I posted earlier). This should be easy enough to confirm with a meter, though probably harder to find and fix, but at least it might give you an idea of where to look.

I had a similar short between +5V and ground that I could never find. I put that board aside, and my second build worked right away.