Electronic – Is it possible to solder or otherwise connect to this camera chip by hand

cameraintegrated-circuitsolderingsurface-mount

[Disclaimer: I'm a beginner.] I ordered this OV7740 camera chip from Digikey without really researching it, thinking maybe I could connect to it with a microcontroller. (I have only Arduino at this point).

Digikey part page
"Datasheet" link

I just took these photos, next to a penny.

One side of chip

The other side

How do you connect to that? Is there a name for that type of connection? Can it only be handled by robots, or is there something I can learn to do by hand that could connect to those 32 contact points?

The sides of that chip are about 2-3 mm.

Best Answer

That looks like a BGA surface mount component. It is possible to solder these parts to a PCB by hand using a variety of different methods.

  • Use a hot-air rework station

rework station

  • Use a reflow oven. This can be a professional one, or more commmon for hobbyists is to build your own from a toaster oven or a hot plate. For really cheap you can try using the toaster oven/hot plate without any extra controlling circuitry, just carefully watch the process.

Note: If you use the second option, be sure NOT to use the same toaster oven/hot plate for cooking food you're planning on eating or feeding to someone else.

Whichever method you choose you'll want to get a pair of very fine point tweezers, or even better a vacuum pickup tool.

pickup tool

You'll also want some kind of magnifying system. This allows you to precisely align components. Some people use a headband magnifier, others use a full-on desk microscope.

Soldering BGA packages also usually requires solder paste and flux.

You can get breakout prototyping boards for BGA packages, these are a basic PCB board which route the BGA's pinout to some through-hole pins you can solder headers or wires to.

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