Chip Sockets

[avalonbeer]

My latest shipment from adafruit arrived last night with a USBtinyISP and a few of the barebones AVR boards. Many thanks for including chip sockets for the cpu chips, they were a nice surprise.

My question relates to other chips, in this case the 74AHC125 buffer. Should I also socket it? I've tended to socket every chip I've worked with over the years because sockets were cheap and chips were expensive. With sockets getting more expensive I'm wondering if it's worth it. Am I just being overly cautious with my Weller WTCPTD?

[zener]

It is personal preference. Some people think it is easier to troubleshoot with sockets. I am good at soldering and I prefer no sockets. In production, sockets can be a point of failure but usually not. Make sure to use dual wipe not single wipe. Most are dual these days. You can still get cheap sockets.

[adafruit_support_mike]

A chip socket adds a few cents to your component cost, and a few picofarads of parasitic capacitance to your circuit board. If neither of those bothers you (and 95% of the time they won't), like Zener said, it's a matter of taste.

My taste runs toward using sockets. Chips are more likely to go poof than passives, and unsoldering them is a pain. OTOH, I mostly use SMT these days, so it's kind of a moot point for me.

[stinkbutt]

I socket everything. I have no compelling reason for arguing one way or the other, but that's the way I like to put together my projects, if for no other reason than it allows me to reprogram it without it being in the circuit.

[eventhorizon]

I like sockets when I think that I want to use that chip for another project. Also I don't prefer soldering directly to expensive chips. Usually I socket the uC's, and the other components would be soldered directly to the board.

[dbc]

Ohh.... a hot button of mine. Once upon a time I took a course where about 1/2 of the semester was reliability calculations. Basically, that was 7 weeks of repeatedly doing the math until you were totally convinced that sockets are evil. Not that it matters much to a hobbyist(*), and in certain prototyping situations they are well worth the time saved.

The only time I use a socket in my own hobby work is if the situation calls for a ZIF socket. Desoldering a chip that has leaked its magic smoke is easy if you just clip off all the leads and take out the pins one by one. Especially easy with a hot air rework unit. (I have an Aoyue 852A which is reasonably priced and always at my elbow. Should have gotten one sooner.)

-dave

(*) Unless you build robots, which I do. Sockets fail the shake-rattle-and-roll test. Or unless you do RF -- I'm also a ham radio operator.

[pstemari]

+1 on the 852A. Picked one up at Fry's and it does a nice job for minmal $$$. I haven't tried anything gonzo with it, but 0603's, QFP's, and SOIC's go on well. I need to get some solder paste--currently I'm hand-soldering the parts in roughly and then reflowing them, which improves the alignment

[Agent24]

Unless a design specifically says not to use one (as was the case with an FM radio kit I built) I always use them and have never had any problems caused by them that I know of.