When I need to stack surface-mount components I use a bit of "blue painters tape" on my bench with the sticky side up. I place a few large washers or similar on the ends of the tape to keep it from sliding around or curling.
Then, just stick the parts to the tape in the proper alignment and solder them together. I've even built an "order 7" elliptic filter that way. :-)
Steve
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On 10/26/24 04:49 AM, dvalin via groups.io wrote:
On 25.10.24 23:41, Luke Vogel wrote:
> I was hoping for a bit of a simple work around to achieve this.
TLDR; Skip to last paragraph.
If soldering all four capacitors in a neat little stack is OK for your
public to perform, then I'd make a library component without pads. Then
you could place one ordinary capacitor with pads, and place additional
padless capacitors in the same place.
That also solves the BOM issue, as all capacitors are there separately,
without special treatment or any effort.
The neat little stack also minimises stray capacitance where you are
tweaking to the nearest pF. Spreading components in a broader plane
cannot be as effective in that regard.
And if someone skews a capacitor a few degrees in the stack, then it
won't matter after the lid is on the box.
If there are many to do, then maybe pre-assemble each "216 pF" unit by
soldering them while held against a flat surface, in tweezers or
similar. Alternatively, the three sides of a cut off corner of a
cardboard box might align all and allow holding with a toothpick.
Subsequent soldering onto pre-tinned pads might then be achieved without
much loss of aesthetic appeal.
Mind you, if the extra stray capacitance of planar placement (maybe +5 pF?) is OK in practice, then I'd just place the capacitors with abutting pads, linked with half a mm of track, and cancel
any clearance errors in the DRC. Then you don't have to? do anything.
Erik
Steven A. Falco