[John P. Barker] writes up an interesting product called Wire Glue. This conductive adhesive is a paint-on alternative to soldering. At first it seems like a bizarre product but we can think of a few uses. Who hasn’t had a solder joint on a free-formed circuit break? One thing’s for sure, we’d recommend throwing a resistor into that LED circuit he’s working on.
Our reader [Damir] built a home made soldering pot. It can be used to solder and desolder components. To remove a through hole component, the solder side is placed in the bath. Then the component is removed with pliers. It is also possible to solder components, by placing the leads in the molten solder; similar to wave soldering. Another common use is tinning self stripping wire. The insulation of the wire is designed to burn off, allowing the strip and tin phase to be single step. This solder pot would be a nice addition to the hacker’s soldering station we had covered in 2008. For more pictures, check out the photo gallery. In the video embedded below, a transformer is easily removed from a modem.
Many people find themselves frustrated when working with headphones. The tiny coated wire can be a real pain to work with. They are so very very small, and usually coated. We generally just end up doing a quick “sand and tape” which just isn’t very high quality. [Alex] sent in some tips that can really help you get those repairs or modifications going.
Joystiq has been tracking the new starlet of Xbox 360 failures: the E74 error. It appears as the lower right light on the console turning red and an on-screen message telling the user to contact support with the error E74. The number of reported E74 errors seems to have risen since August 2008 and people are wondering if the more recent increase in errors are related to the release of the New Xbox Experience (NXE) Dashboard update. Did Microsoft reclass Red Ring of Death (RROD) failures as E74 to avoid warranty replacements? Read the rest of this entry »
Hobby electronics manufacturer SparkFun has started offering various classes at their Boulder, CO facility. [Landon] has been attending as many as possible and posted about his experience during their Stencil and Solder Paste class. Solder paste is used when manufacturing boards with a reflow oven. He took quite a few pictures of the process and posted notes and audio. He says it’s definitely something you’d have to learn hands-on, but his numerous photos give you an idea of what’s involved. Below, you can watch a video of the paste clean-up pass and stencil removal.
[doctek] wants to help ease any fear you may have of surface mount design. He has written this extremely in depth explanation of how to design and build an LED driver composed of surface mount parts. While there has been plenty of surface mount instruction floating around for a while, he feels that they skimp on the details, especially when it comes to really tiny parts who’s pads are unreachable with a soldering iron. The method he uses is the “hot plate” method we’ve seen before. There’s enough information to build your own tiny LED driver with pulse width modulation, as well as tons of references to explain how and why he does things the way he does. Great job [doctek].
If you’re going to be doing a lot of soldering, you should check out our soldering station how to.
[mightyohm] put together a nice piece of lab kit. It’s a PID controlled hot plate. The plate is capable of reaching 500F, hot enough to do SMD reflow soldering. The large chunk of metal has a hole drilled through the center to contain a cartridge heater. A thermocouple is used to monitor the temperature of the plate. Ceramic standoffs separate the plate from the rest of the device, but he still needs to come up with a way to stop the radiant heating. The control box houses the surplus PID controller along with the power switch and solid state relay (SSR).
Cold Heat soldering irons are pretty cool. They heat up in seconds and cool down just as quickly. [photozz] shows us how we can make one from stuff we probably have sitting around right now. Cold Heat soldering irons work off of resistance, the tip material heats very quickly when electricity is passed through the two halves. Upon assessing what he had lying around, [photozz] realized that graphite would work much the same way. He modified a regular soldering iron with a new two piece graphite tip, and powered it with an old pc power supply. The end result is quite nice, though it still needs some kind of temperature control. You may recall seeing other electrical uses for graphite, such as making quick and dirty light.
Hack a Day serves up fresh hacks each day, every day from around the web as well as hacking related news.
