I needed a rail-to-rail op amp in a DIP package to breadboard the amplifier for those toroids and came up dry, so I sawed out a protoboard square, glued a MAX4330 in SOT23-5 atop it in classic dead-bug style, rearranged the leads into the standard DIP pinout, and moved on:
The trick to getting the header pins aligned is to stick ’em in a pile of perfboards, which instantly makes them stand up straight and parallel:
Stick the square adapter atop the headers, solder all eight pins, glue down the SOT23, and solder it with wire-wrap snippets. Ugly, but workable…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
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3 responses to “SMD-to-DIP Adapter: Pin Soldering “Fixture””
These are available commercially (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/717) but I totally understand the need to get something done instead of wait days for parts to be delivered. I still stuff my headers into the breadboards to align them, even though I have to solder ’em quickly to avoid damaging my breadboard. As it happens, the worst heat-damaged breadboard I have was melted by a very unhappy TTL chip (which still worked afterward, amazingly).
Those are cute little gizmos, but this circuit really cries out for a clean PCB layout: shuffling millivolt signals around on a solderless breadboard just doesn’t work well at all.
Must. Resist. Temptation.
[…] With the LM324 quad op amp running from +5 V, its output can’t get above +4 V. That’s good enough for a logic-level trigger, although a real circuit should use something like the MAX4330 I hacked into a DIP footprint. […]