hot air soldering

3 Articles

Soldering The Elusive USB C Port

April 9, 2024 by 10 Comments

Many SMD components, including some USB C ports, have their terminals under the component. When installed, the pins are totally hidden. So, how do you solder or unsolder them? That’s the problem [Learn Electronics Repair] encountered when fixing a Lenovo Yoga, and he shows us his solution in the video below.

He showed the removal in a previous video, but removal is a bit easier since you can just heat up the area, yank the connector, and then clean up the resulting mess at your leisure. Installation is harder because once the socket is down, you no longer have access to the pads.

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Robotics Club Teaches Soldering

November 13, 2020 by 25 Comments

Oregon State University must be a pretty good place to go to school if you want to hack on robots. Their robotics club, which looks active and impressive, has a multi-part video series on how to solder surface mount components that is worth watching. [Anthony] is the team lead for their Mars Rover team and he does the job with some pretty standard-looking tools.

The soldering station in use is a sub-$100 Aoyue with both a regular iron and hot air. There’s also a cheap USB microscope that looks like it has a screen, but is covered in blue tape to hold it to an optical microscope. So no exotic tools that you’d need a university affiliation to match.

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Hack Your Hot Air Station

May 25, 2017 by 32 Comments

It used to be hot air soldering gear was exotic, but not anymore. There are plenty of relatively inexpensive choices. Many of these appear to be the same despite having different brand names and model numbers. One that is common and inexpensive is the 858D. These run about $50. [Gabse] has one and decided to upgrade it using some open source controller hardware and software. There wasn’t a complete guide, so he created one himself.

According to the original GitHub page, the controller will work with the Youyue-858D and any clones. However, there are others like the Atten 858D that use a different controller. In addition, there have been several variants. [Gabse’s] guide is for the latest version. Information on other versions and brands might be on this discussion board thread.

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