I'm working on a personal PCB design project where I need to be able to remove a component easily (to swap out, etc). The component has two rows of 8 pins (standard 0.1" pitch).
At first, I designed the board where the pads were slightly staggered so that the component would "lock" in. However, I quickly realized upon receiving the fabbed PCB that the component stays in, but does not make a reliable connection. I temporarily soldered in a couple 8-pin headers and that fixed the connection issue while keeping the component non-permanent. However, the header is too tall for my needs. I would prefer the component be as flush as possible with the board.
Are there such things as bottomless SIP sockets/female machine pin headers? The component has rather long pins that I cannot cut and the typical SIP socket depth seems too shallow.
An alternative might be to make the pad holes smaller on the PCB… Would this result in a reliable connection without solder?
Thanks for any help and advice!
Best Answer
For a next design:
If the pins on your device are long, sometimes a through board socket might work, like this one:
http://katalog.we-online.de/en/em/613_0xx_157_21?sid=1be59820d4
You can mount that at the bottom and stick the pins through the board into that socket. If you wonder whether it'll work, you can contact your local Wurth office and ask them for a couple of samples, they supply them for free to all natural persons, pro's and hobbyists alike.
Or these are SMT dual entry, that you can put on the bottom of the board, but they will stick out a bit more, as they are also for top-entry:
http://katalog.we-online.de/en/em/610_0xx_119_21?sid=1be59820d4
Many suppliers have components like that as well. If your chip's pins are average diameter it'll most likely work.
However, I have seen people make an ENIG finish board with holes that are tuned to the chip's pin size and staggered by about the hole radius. But it's usually not a production-spec kind of thing.