solder

112 Articles

Let Your Finger Do The Soldering With Solder Sustainer V2

April 11, 2024 by 20 Comments

Soldering is easy, as long as you have one hand to hold the iron, one to hold the solder, and another to hold the workpiece. For those of us not so equipped, there’s the new and improved Solder Sustainer v2, which aims to free up one of however many hands you happen to have.

Eagle-eyed readers will probably recall an earlier version of Solder Sustainer, which made an appearance in last year’s Hackaday Prize in the “Gearing Up” round. At the time we wrote that it looked a bit like “the love child of a MIG welder and a tattoo machine.” This time around, [RoboticWorx] has rethought that concept and mounted the solder feeder on the back of a fingerless glove. The solder guide is a tube that clips to the user’s forefinger, which makes much finer control of where the solder meets the iron possible than with the previous version. The soldering iron itself is also no longer built into the tool, giving better control of the tip and letting you use your favorite iron, which itself is no small benefit.

Hats off to [RoboticWorx] for going back to the drawing board on this one. It isn’t easy to throw out most of your design and start over, but sometimes it just makes sense.

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SMD Soldering, Without The Blobs

March 30, 2024 by 21 Comments

Hand soldering of surface mount components is a bread-and-butter task for anyone working with electronics in 2024. So many devices are simply no longer available in the older through-hole formats, and it’s now normal for even the most homebrew of circuits to use a PCB. But how do you solder your parts? If like us you put a blob of solder on a pad and drop the part into it, then [Mr. SolderFix] has some advice on a way to up your game.

The blob of solder method leaves a little more solder on the part than is optimal, sometimes a bulbous lump of the stuff. Instead, he puts a bit of flux on the pad and then applies a much smaller quantity of solder on the tip of his iron, resulting in a far better joint. As you can see in the video below, the difference is significant. He starts with passives, but then shows us the technique on a crystal, noting that it’s possible to get the solder on the top of these parts if too much is used. Yes, we’ve been there. Watch the whole video, and improve your surface mount soldering technique!

He’s someone we’ve featured before here at Hackaday, most recently in lifting surface mount IC pins.

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Check Out These Amazing Self-Soldering Sleeves From World War II

January 31, 2024 by 18 Comments

Imagine you’re a commando, doing some big secret mission on the continent in the midst of World War II. You need to hook up some wires to your explosive charges, and time is of the essence. Do you bust out the trusty Weller and see if those petulant Axis chaps will let you plug it in somewhere? No! You use a pyrotechnic self-soldering sleeve, as [Our Own Devices] explains.

Like so many British inventions during the war, the sleeves really are ingenious. They were developed by the Special Operation Executive, an organization charged with sabotage and subversion operations in then-occupied Europe.

The soldering sleeves were designed to make electrical connections between detonators and firing wires for explosives.  The sleeves consist of a copper tube through which wires to be joined are fed, with a lump of solder in the middle. The assembly is covered in pyrotechnic material with a safety match-style starter chemical dosed on top. Using the sleeves is simple. First, two stripped wires are fed into either end of the copper tube. The starter the sleeve is then ignited using the box, just like striking a match. The pyrotechnic material then gets red hot, melting the solder and making the connection.

It’s well worth watching the video to see how these field-expedient devices actually work. We’ve explored the use of more-typical solder sleeves before, too. Video after the break.

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Retrotechtacular: The Story Of Turpentine

December 4, 2023 by 33 Comments

If someone in 2023 has ever had much call to use turpentine, chances are good it was something to do with paint or other wood finishes, like varnish. Natural turpentine is the traditional solvent of choice for oil paints, which have decreased in popularity with the rise of easy-to-clean polymer-based paints and coating. Oh sure, there are still those who prefer oil paint, especially for trim work — it lays up so nice — but by and large, turpentine seems like a relic from days gone by, like goose grease and castor oil.

It wasn’t always so, though. Turpentine used to be a very big deal indeed, as shown by this circa 1940 documentary on the turpentine harvesting and processing industry. Even then it was only a shadow of its former glory, when it was a vital part of a globe-spanning naval empire and a material of the utmost strategic importance. “Suwanee Pine” shows the methods used in the southern United States, where fast-growing pines offer up a resinous organic gloop in response to wounds in their bark. The process shown looks a lot like the harvesting process for natural latex, with slanting gashes or “catfaces” carved into the trunks of young trees, forming channels to guide the exudate down into a clay collecting cup.

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Solder Two Boards At Once With This Dual Reflow Plate

November 10, 2023 by 4 Comments

Homebrew reflow projects generally follow a pretty simple formula: find a thrift shop toaster oven or hot plate, add a microcontroller and a means to turn the heating element on and off, and close the loop with a thermistor. Add a little code and you’re melting solder paste. Sometimes, though, a ground-up design works better, like this scalable reflow plate with all the bells and whistles.

Now, we don’t mean to hate on the many great reflow projects we’ve seen, of course. But [Michael Benn]’s build is pretty slick. The business end uses 400-watt positive temperature coefficient (PTC) heating elements from Amazon controlled by solid-state relays, although we have to note that we couldn’t find the equivalent parts on the Amazon US site, so that might be a problem. [Michael] also included mechanical temperature cutoffs for each plate, an essential safety feature in case of thermal runaway. The plates are mounted at the top of a 3D-printed case, which also has an angled enclosure for a two-color OLED display and a rotary encoder.

The software runs on an ESP32 and supports multiple temperature profiles for different solder pastes. The software also supports different profiles on the two plates, and even allows for physical expansion to a maximum of four heating plates, or even just a single plate if that’s what you need. The video below shows it going through its paces along with the final results. There’s also a video showing the internals if that’s more your style

We appreciate the fit and finish here, as well as the attention to safety. Can’t find those heating elements for your build? You might have to lose your appetite for waffles.

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Neat Soldering Station Design Has Workshop & Portable Versions

October 5, 2023 by 15 Comments

The warm and rather stinky heart of any hacker’s lair is the soldering station, where the PCB meets the metal (solder). A good soldering station lets you get on with the business of building stuff without worrying about piffling details like temperature and remembering to turn the thing off. The AxxSolder is a neat design from [AxxAxx] that fulfills these criteria, as it includes full PID control of the iron and an auto sleep feature. It will run from any DC power source from 9 to 26 Volts, so you can run it off your bench power supply and have one less thing to plug in. There is even a portable version for those on-the-go hackathons.

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Hackaday Prize 2023: One-Handed Soldering With The Solder Sustainer

August 4, 2023 by 48 Comments

For a lot of us, soldering has become so ingrained that it’s muscle memory. We know exactly when the iron is hot enough, how long to leave the tip in contact with the joint to heat it up, and exactly where to dab in the solder to get it to flow. When you’re well-practiced it can be a beautiful thing, but for those who don’t do it frequently, soldering can be frustrating indeed.

The “Solder Sustainer” looks like it just might be aimed at solving that problem, as well as a few others. It comes to us from [RoboticWorx], and while it looks a little like the love child of a MIG welder and a tattoo machine, it’s got a lot going for it. The idea is to make soldering a one-handed task by combining the soldering iron and a solder wire feeder into one compact package. The solder feeder is very reminiscent of a filament extruder on a 3D printer, using a stepper to drive spring-loaded pinch wheels, which forces the solder down a curved 3D-printed tube that directs it toward the tip. The pancake stepper is driven by an ESP32, which also supports the touch sensor that lets you advance the solder. The whole thing can be powered off a USB-C power supply, or using the onboard USB charger that can be connected in line with the soldering iron supply.

The video below shows Solder Sustainer in use. Yes, we know — some of those joints look a little iffy. But that seems to have more to do with technique than with the automatic solder feed. And really, in situations where you’ve previously wished for a third hand while soldering, this would probably be just the thing.

The Solder Sustainer is an entry in the “Gearing Up” round of the 2023 Hackaday Prize. If you’ve got an idea for a tool, jig, fixture, or instrument that makes hacking easier, we want to know about it. But you’d better hurry — the round ends on August 8.

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