But I went for
small size and ease of reproducability by multiple
different skill sets. My board has two DIPs on it [...]
If you can solder well
enough to fit 2 DIPs (and associated
components, I gurss), then you can solder 100 DIPs. It's the same
skill.
Yes and no.
It's the same basic skill. But someone who can pretty much mostly
solder OK but, let's say, creates a bad joint 1% of the time has a
pretty good chance of making the small board work first time, and
probably has a decent chance of finding and fixing the bad joint if
there's an issue.
But if that person puts together a board of a hundred DIPs, it is
likely to have at least a dozen bad joints and be difficult to fix,
quite possibly effectively impossible for its builder. (To someone
like you, or maybe even me, not impossible at all, but someone still on
the learning curve for soldering is quite likely going to be on the
learning curve for debugging too.) _You_ wouldn't be daunted by such a
project. Even _I_ wouldn't be - but that wouldn't be true if I hadn't
done lots and lots of smaller circuits already.
I recently built some electronics for work. We were building several
copies of the same circuit, someone else and I. I was somewhat
surprised by how inexpert he was at soldering, but I think I managed to
not let it show (I've been soldering electronics since I had hands big
enough to hold the equipment, but I also know not everyone has been,
and we all have to learn somehow). If he were to put together a
hundred-device board, it would surprise me if it _didn't_ have at least
one soldering error of some sort: bad joint, unwanted solder bridge,
component mis-inserted, something. But what we were building was
small, maybe a few dozen joints to solder, and I think his turned out
just as working as mine did - certainly most of them did.
100 lines of C
on an ATMEL AVR.
But to built the AVR solution you need the C compiler, something
that
can run the C compiler, the AVR programmer (or JTAG cable, perhaps),
something to run the software for that, etc.
True. But a lot of people already have much of that and don't mind
picking up the rest.
Different solutions for different people....
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