They are called soft termination, I’m not sure if that’s available for every component, it came to my attention on ceramic caps. It’s a dedicated feature you can filter components e.g. on Digikey.

I’d say that’s a version of a soft termination capacitor. They are used when there’s risk the board is flexed or exposed to mechanical or thermal shocks to prevent cracks in the capacitor (causing it to fail short).

It’s not really missing, there’s some life-insurance fraud going on.

Mine is the smallest one of a series of these, it has two heating elements inside.

I don’t have it for that long but I didn’t have problems so far, I’m usually only making rather small PCBs tho. I did make some recommended modifications like replacing the paper insulation tape with a kapton tape, proper grounding and flashed another firmware.

I did only use a small hotplate and/or a hotair station, so it seems to be definitely a stepup here 😌.

I was kind of afraid of SMD things in general a long time but I discovered they are (up to a certain size, 0603 is still okay for hand assembly if you’re patient) comfortable to work with. Even QFN packages are okay if you have access to a hot-air station. I did actually order an BGA sensor out of curiosity along with other things, looked at it and was like “hahaha, thanks, I probably better don’t design that thing into my circuit” (I think it’s a 5-WLCSP package).

Maybe they first have to make it worthless before trying to buy it.

I just received that gel-flux I ordered and gave it a try on some cheaper boards I got to practice :D. I did mess up one but the second one actually did come out pretty okay and wasn’t too much of an issue:

(The rightmost pins are connected anyways on the PCB)

It’s based on the Friends Heartlake Cupcake Café (41119), I replaced the pink pieces with red and white ones and added the upper windows to fit the station on top. The station in Ninjago city was the very first thing I added :).

(I don’t know why the picture is sideways 🤔)

Oh don’t be afraid it doesn’t go to nowhere :D. I just posted some images how that line continues :).

I only have very runny liquid flux here but I did just order some gel "tack flux" and give that a try :).

It actually depends, on longer posts they somehow disturb the reading flow for me (because they are kind of distracting compared to plain text). For short comments on the other hand I like them and find them rather refreshing.

Thanks for starting a new home for the community ☺️.

Do we like emojis here or rather not? :D