PCB Toaster Oven Solders Your Boards

August 28, 2023 by Al Williams 15 Comments

Using a toaster oven to reflow PCBs isn’t anything new, but just using a toaster oven has some limitations. Making toast isn’t as complex as reflowing PCBs. [Nabil] decided to modify an oven to get better results. In fact, this was the second iteration and involved making a custom PCB to replace the one in the oven. You can see the unit in the video below.

Of course, unless you have the exact oven (a Breville BOV450XL), you won’t want to duplicate the board, but it might give you some good ideas. The new board has a 2.8-inch capacitive LCD, an ESP32, and a few sensors and actuators.

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Can You Use An Easy-Bake Oven For Reflow Soldering?

December 13, 2020 by Kristina Panos 12 Comments

The answer is yes, yes you can. As long as you have one made after about 2011, at least. In the video after the break, [Blitz City DIY] takes us briefly through the history of the venerable Easy-Bake Oven and into the future by reflow soldering a handful of small blinky boards with it.

You’re right, these things once used special light bulbs to cook pint-sized foods, but now they are legit ovens with heating elements that reach 350°F and a little above. The only trouble is that there’s no temperature controller, so you have to use low-temperature solder paste and an oven thermometer to know when to pull the little tray out. Other than that, it looked like smooth sailing.

If you’re only doing a board every once in a while, $40 for a reflow oven isn’t too shabby. And yeah, as with all ovens, once you’ve reflowed a board in it, don’t use it for food.

If you’d rather build an oven, high-powered light bulbs will still do the trick.

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Building A Compact Reflow Oven With Halogen Lamps

September 25, 2020 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

Very often, particularly on the Internet, we’re fooled into thinking bigger is always better. The fact remains that this isn’t always the case. When it comes to reflow ovens, for example if you’re working with short runs of small PCBs, or if you just don’t have a lot of space in the workshop, a smaller oven will be more desirable than a large one. It’s factors like these that drove [Sergi Martínez]’s latest build.

Built inside a metal project case, first attempts involved using an off-the-shelf heating element, with poor results. The element had a high thermal inertia, and was designed for use in water, so didn’t last in the reflow application. Learning from the experience of others, [Sergi] switched to using halogen lamps, netting much greater success. An Arduino Nano is responsible for running the show, using firmware developed by [0xPIT]. There’s also a screen for monitoring reflow profiles, and a cooling fan to help keep temperature in the ideal zone.

It’s a tidy build that would be particularly useful for quickly running batches of small PCBs without the long wait times required to heat a larger oven. Energy efficiency should be better, too. Of course, if you’re a fan of the classic toaster oven builds, we’ve got those too. Video after the break.

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Touch Screen Reflow Oven Pulls Out All The Stops

July 16, 2020 by Tom Nardi 17 Comments

We’ve seen plenty of simple reflow ovens, and there’s an excellent chance that some of the people reading these words have even thrown their own together. A minimal example isn’t much more than a old toaster oven, a Solid State Relay (SSR), a thermocouple, and a microcontroller to get them all talking. But if you’re like [Mangy_Dog] and willing to put in a bit more effort, the final result can be a capable piece of equipment that will be the envy of the hackerspace.

This build started as most do, with a search for a used toaster oven. But in the end he actually found a German model cheap enough that he could buy it new without going over budget for the project. Though he soon found out why: when it arrived, the so-called “pizza oven” was far smaller than he’d imagined. Luckily, it ended up being the perfect size for PCBs.

Unfortunately, the heating elements weren’t quite where he wanted them. Even after wrapping the heating chamber with ceramic insulation, a feature that was likely left off the original oven to cut costs, he says the temperature would only rise about 1 degree per second. So he added an additional halogen heating element at the top of the oven which pushed that rate up to 6 degrees per second.

Control is provided by an Arduino Pro Mini and a touch screen display with some very slick graphics. There’s the expected thermocouple to detect the current temperature, but while the earlier versions of the electronics used the aforementioned SSR to control the heating elements, [Mangy_Dog] eventually replaced it with a dimmer module rated for 4000 watts. After coming up with a circuit that allowed him to control the dimmer with the Arduino, this module gave for much finer control over the chamber temperature. Plus it apparently kept all the lights in his house from flickering when the elements kicked in at 100%, which was a nice bonus.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen somebody shoehorn an LCD into an off-the-shelf toaster oven, but it’s certainly one of the most polished examples to ever come our way. When even commercially available units need some hacking to reach feature parity with DIY versions, building your own reflow oven still seems like the way to go in 2020.

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A Drop-In Controller Replacement For Commercial Reflow Ovens

July 11, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

If you need a reflow oven, you can very easily head down to Walmart or Target and pick up a toaster oven for fifteen bucks or so. Even without any control electronics, a bone-stock toaster oven works well enough for reflow soldering, but if you want to do it right you’ll also want to add a themocouple, a microcontroller, and maybe a fancy display. That’s option one.

If you value your time more than your money, you’ll probably just plonk down a few hundred bucks for a T-962A reflow oven, the standard infrared oven that’s meant for reflowing solder. It’s a good oven, but as with all bargain basement tools from China, the user interface isn’t great. [PhillyFlyers] is working on a drop-in controller for what is probably the most popular reflow oven on the planet, and this thing looks good.

This is a controller for the T-962A oven that includes all the connectors as the stock control board. We’ve seen a few of these projects to improve cheap tools, from 3D printer controllers to a replacement board for the ubiquitous K40 laser cutter. Now the most popular reflow oven is getting the same treatment.

The specs for this replacement board include a five-inch, 800 x 480 display, powered by an STM32H7 microcontroller. All of the usual functionality of the oven is retained, but it adds the ability to hand-draw reflow profiles, save reflow profiles to an SD card, and support for four K-type thermocouples. Basically, it’s what you would expect from an upgraded version of the T-962 oven.

Most importantly, this is a direct drop-in replacement for the stock electronics. Grab one of these boards, and all you have to do for installation is break out a screwdriver. It makes a great tool even better, which is exactly what this very popular reflow oven needs.

A Bright Idea For Reflow Soldering

July 13, 2017 by Elliot Williams 70 Comments

There are almost as many ways to reflow a surface-mount circuit board as there are hackers. Today, we add another method to the list. [Dasaki] converted a halogen floodlight into an SMT oven, and did so with all the bells and whistles. Check the video below the break.

We’ve actually seen the low-tech version of this hack before, but it’s nothing we would want to use on a daily basis. [Dasaki] needed to get 100 boards done, so it was worth the effort to get it right.

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An Hour To Surface Mount

June 27, 2017 by Al Williams 26 Comments

Most of us have made the transition from through hole parts to surface mount. There are lots of scattered tutorials, but if you want to learn some techniques or compare your technique to someone else’s, you might enjoy [Moto Geek’s] hour-long video on how he does surface mount with reflow soldering. You can see the video below.

What makes the video interesting is that it is an hour long and covers the gamut from where to get cheap PCBs, to a homebrew pick and place pencil. [Moto Geek] uses a stencil with solder paste, and he provides links to the materials he uses. Continue reading “An Hour To Surface Mount” →