Knowledge gleaned from failure.

PCB Related

Designing

1. Altium Designer is great! Until it's not...
2. Adding a new part to a group Altium library (e.g. WarnickShareLibrary) must be designed outside the library first. When complete, copy/paste it into the group library afterwards. This prevents multiple users from working in the same library and overwriting/losing each others' changes.
3. Check the export to Gerber files carefully, epecially holes and solder mask layers.
4. Get another student to review your PCB before having it sent out. Many errors are caught this way.

Soldering and Prototyping

1. Flux is your friend
2. Use leaded solder; the lower melting temperature makes rework easier.
3. Temperature matters!
4. When reworking with a heat gun, bath the part in heat with the tip held a couple inches away for 30 seconds or so at first, then bring the tip closer. Helps prevent thermal shock. Same for cooling down. Most chips can only take 1 or 2 reworks before they're toast.

Tricks

1. Fast prototyping
2. Recycling high pin count connectors:
   1. Re-bake it in the oven
   2. When temperature is max, open oven
   3. Quickly pull connector off

Xilinx

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