single sided A3977 board ( got files uploaded )

[pminmo]

Looks nice. The 0603's are no harder to solder than the 0805's. It's the handling and placement of the little burgers. I think some where in the future I may take a shot at building a manual pick and place to make these 54 yr old hands steadier...:-). I must admit I was leary about going to smd's, not I hate using leaded stuff. The plcc isn't that bad to solder.
The one point I might make is soldering the gnds on the plcc. If you don't have any thermal breaks, it will make soldering the part even more difficult unless you have solder paste and an oven.

[ahoodlum]

Ahhh right, I left that concern out too. It's a tricky problem with that because they say you want good thermal conduction to GND for when the IC is running, but you don't want good thermal conduction when you are hand soldering.

I just put little polygons over those three pads on each side so I suppose I could just as easily remove them. Seeing how I'll be running little motors, I probably don't need the big poly's over those pads. Thanks for pointing that out!

[cncbits]

Hi to all, just tested a single sided design based off others on this list. Never done smt parts before and used the hot air paint stripper technique with solder paste. Board is 3 1/2 inch by 2 1/2 inch. New Zealand seems quite hard to get help on producing cost effective boards