hackrid wrote:what's your preferred procedure when doing so? are you glueing the wires down some how? can you share some pictures of your work with us?
You need to use ultra-thin (0.05 mm) enameled copper wire, like this one:
http://www.conrad.de/ce/de/product/6075 ... 0-m-Conrad
You first burn one end with the soldering iron until it smokes, meaning the enamel isolation is gone, then apply solder to it, then solder it to the QFN pin with some flux (pen): the solder will flow below the chip by capillarity and make a good enough solder joint.
If you are lucky (like it seems to be the case with the ESP8266), the pins have a small sidewall protrusion on the chip side, so solder doesn't need to flow below the chip.
Once you have all the wires correct, have them hot glue blobbed for better mechanical strength.
But I found an AliExpress shop selling ESP8266 modules with all pins broken out to pads:
http://www.aliexpress.com/store/product ... 76346.html
Detailled pinout can be guessed from this other shop picture:
http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a1z ... 0328222213
I ordered 5 from them, so it looks like we will not have to do micro-surgery