I might join this year's #prague #pride as a #queppie.. as in #queer #hippe 😂 you know.. #earth and #bushcraft 🤭 'n #composted ehm.. ..it

Now wouldn't that be a blast ya'll? Anyways, gotta think about the short .. i mean, i ain't all that hip bout bein queer kid ynow.. it's gotta sound folky and cottagey and offgrid and stuff..

see, something akin to #qfn over in what passes for Mordor these days...

#queer #lgbtqia #trans

Nifty Chip Adapter Does The Impossible

The semiconductor shortage has curtailed the choices available to designers and caused some inventive solutions to be found, but the one used by [djzc] is probably the most inventive we've yet seen. The footprint trap, when a board is designed for one footprint but shortages mean the part is only available in another, has caught out many an engineer this year. In this case an FTDI chip had been designed with a PCB footprint for a QFN package when the only chip to be found was a QFP from a breakout board.

The three boards which make up the adapter

For those unfamiliar with semiconductor packaging, a QFN and QFP share a very similar epoxy package, but the QFN has its pins on the underside flush with the epoxy and the QFP has them splayed out sideways. A QFP is relatively straightforward to hand-solder so it's likely we'll have seen more of them than QFNs on these pages.

There is no chance for a QFP to be soldered directly to a QFN footprint, so what's to be done? The solution is an extremely inventive one, a two-PCB sandwich bridging the two. A lower PCB is made of thick material and mirrors the QFN footprint above the level of the surrounding components, while the upper one has the QFN on its lower side and a QFP on its upper. When they are joined together they form an inverted top-hat structure with a QFN footprint below and a QFP footprint on top. Difficult to solder in place, but the result is a QFP footprint to which the chip can be attached. We like it, it's much more elegant than elite dead-bug soldering!

#techhacks #qfn #qfp #soldering