A USB -C Soldering Iron For Weller Tips

April 19, 2019 by Jenny List 5 Comments

There was a time when a decent temperature controlled soldering iron took the form of the iron itself and a box of electronics, but now it’s just as likely to be a miniaturised affair with the temperature controller built into a slim and lightweight handle. Irons such as the Miniware TS series have become firm favourites, displacing a traditional soldering station for many.

[Thomas.lepi] has combined the best of both worlds, with a TS-style microprocessor-driven handle driving the familiar Weller RT elements. Its interface is very simple, but through its USB power socket a serial port provides opportunities for adjustment. Providing control is an STM32F042G6U6 ARM Cortex M0 microcontroller, with USB power control coming from an STUSB4500QTR .

If you are used to irons such as the Miniware TS100 then this one with its smartly 3D-printed case will be very straightforward to use. Whether or not the ready availability of the TS100 or its USB-C sibling would remove the need to build this iron is up to you, but then again that’s hardly the point. The Weller tips are some of the better ones of their type, so perhaps that might make this project worth a second look.

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DIY Reflow Oven Is Heavily Documented

March 10, 2019 by Al Williams 8 Comments

[DJ Legion] decided he wanted a reflow oven so he bought a toaster oven and an assortment of parts including a solid state relay, a Teensy, a display, and a thermocouple. What makes this a different project is the amount of video documentation. The four videos below encompass about 50 minutes of information and he’s promising more to come.

We haven’t found his software — probably because he’s still working on it, but we’re watching his GitHub page expectantly. We really liked the 3D printed faceplate that integrated the controller into the oven. It almost looks like a commercial unit. The use of the woodgrain paper over the 3D printed parts was a nice touch.

[DJ] is not done, though. He wants to increase the heat up time and possibly add convection. He’s also planning on a new video that will show actually making a board and how he has refined the calibration curves.

We are impressed but would have been tempted to just grab a Reflowduino. The work’s already done, and you get wireless control and lots of other goodies. Of course, we also get the urge to do it yourself, so we can’t really throw stones. If you don’t want to mess with an oven, you can always raid the hair salon.

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The Craziest Live Soldering Demo Is The Cyborg Ring

February 1, 2019 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

You can define the word crazy in myriad ways. Some would say using SMD resistors and QFN microcontrollers as structural elements is crazy. Some would say hand soldering QFN is crazy, much less trying to do it on edge rather than in the orientation the footprint is designed for. And of course doing it live on stage in front of people who eat flux for breakfast is just bonkers. But Zach did it anyway and I’m delighted he did.

This is the cyborg ring, and it’s a one-of-a-kind leap in imagination — the kind of leap people have come to expect from Zach Fredin who modeled neurons on PCBs, depopulated an SMD LED matrix and airwired it, and replaced his ThinkPad fingerprint reader with an ARM debugger port. The construction leverages the precise nature of manufactured parts: the ATtiny85 that drives the ring is exactly twice the width of an 0805 component. This means he can bridge the two circuit boards that make up the ring with the QFN microcontroller, and then use two 10M Ohm resistors as structural spacers in a few places around the ring. The jewels in this gem of a project are red LEDs that can be addressed in an animated pattern.

There’s an adage that all live talk demos are doomed to fail, and indeed the uC in this project doesn’t want to speak to the programmer at the end of the 9-minute exhibition. But Zach did manage to solder the two halves on the ring together live on stage, and it’s worth enduring the camera issues and low starting volume at the start of this livestream to watch him perform some crazy magic. Good on you Zach for putting yourself out there and showing everyone that there’s more than one way to stack resistors.

If this demo leaves you wanting to hear more of what Zach’s adventures, we recommend checking out his 2016 Supercon talk on the Neurobytes development and manufacturing process.

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Soldering Like It’s 205 BC

September 18, 2018 by Dan Maloney 43 Comments

Did you ever stop to think how unlikely the discovery of soldering is? It’s hard to imagine what sequence of events led to it; after all, metals heated to just the right temperature while applying an alloy of lead and tin in the right proportions in the presence of a proper fluxing agent doesn’t seem like something that would happen by accident.

Luckily, [Chris] at Clickspring is currently in the business of recreating the tools and technologies that would have been used in ancient times, and he’s made a wonderful video on precision soft soldering the old-fashioned way. The video below is part of a side series he’s been working on while he builds a replica of the Antikythera mechanism, that curious analog astronomical computer of antiquity. Many parts in the mechanism were soldered, and [Chris] explores plausible methods using tools and materials known to have been available at the time the mechanism was constructed (reported by different historians as any time between 205 BC and 70 BC or so). His irons are forged copper blocks, his heat source is a charcoal fire, and his solder is a 60:40 mix of lead and tin, just as we use today. He vividly demonstrates how important both surface prep and flux are, and shows both active and passive fluxes. He settled on rosin for the final joints, which turned out silky smooth and perfect; we suspect it took quite a bit of practice to get the technique down, but as always, [Chris] makes it look easy.

If you’d like to dig a bit deeper into modern techniques, we’ve covered the physics of solder and fluxes in some depth. And if you need more of those sweet, sweet Clickspring videos, we’ve got you covered there as well.

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Competitive Soldering Is Now A Thing

August 30, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 51 Comments

At Hackaday, we’re constantly impressed by the skill and technique that goes into soldering up some homebrew creations. We’re not just talking about hand-soldering 80-pin QFNs without a stencil, either: there are people building charlieplexed LED arrays out of bare copper wire, and using Kynar wire for mechanical stability. There are some very, very talented people out there, and they all work in the medium of wire, heat, and flux.

At this year’s DEF CON, we opened the floodgates to competitive soldering. Along with [Bunny] from Hardware Hacking Village and the many volunteers from the HHV and Soldering Skills Village, dozens competed to solder up a tiny kit full of LEDs and microscopic resistors.

The kit in question was an SMD Challenge Kit put together my MakersBox, and consisted of a small PCB, an SOIC-8 ATtiny, and a LED and resistor for 1206, 0805, 0603, 0402, and 0201 sizes. The contest is done in rounds. Six challengers compete at a time, and everyone is given 35 minutes to complete the kit.

We’ve seen — and participated in — soldering challenges before, and each one has a slightly unique twist to make it that much more interesting. For example, at this summer’s Toorcamp, the soldering challenge was to simply drink a beer before moving to the next size of parts. You would solder the 1206 LED and resistor sober, drink a beer, solder the 0805, drink a beer, and keep plugging away until you get to the 01005 parts. Yes, people were able to do it.

Of course, being DEF CON and all, we were trying to be a bit more formal, and drinking before noon is uncouth. The rules for this Soldering Challenge award points on five categories: the total time taken, if the components are actually soldered down, a ‘functionality’ test, the orientation of the parts, and the quality of the solder joints.

The winners of the soldering challenge, at the Hackaday Breakfast Meetup at DEF CON 26

So, with those rules in place, who won the Soldering Challenge at this year’s DEF CON? Out of a total 25 points, the top scorers are:

[True] – 23 pts
[Rushan] – 19 pts
[Ryan] – 18 pts
[Beardbyte] – 18 pts
[Casey] – 18 pts
[Bob] – 18 pts
[Nick] – 18 pts
[JEGEVA] – 18 pts

The Soldering Challenge had an incredible turnout, and the entire Soldering Skills Village was packed to the gills with folks eager to pick up an iron. The results were phenomenal!

We’d like to extend a note of thanks to [Bunny], the Hardware Hacking Village, the Soldering Skills Village, and MakersBox for making this happening. It was truly a magical experience, and now that competitive soldering is a thing, we’re going to be doing this a few more times. How do you think this could be improved? Leave a note in the comments.

Do You Need A Solder Fume Extractor?

July 10, 2018 by Al Williams 78 Comments

We’ll admit it. Most of us have been soldering since we were kids and we don’t think of it as a particularly dangerous activity. Just keep the hot and cold end of the iron straight and remember not to flick solder off the tip on your leg and you are fine. We sometimes roll our eyes a bit at the people with the soldering fume extractors unless you are soldering 8 hours a day, although we’ve occasionally used a small fan nearby just to get some circulation. [Tanner Tech’s] video on soldering fumes might make us rethink that, though (see below).

[Tanner] rigs up a fan with some plastic bottles, fans, and some cotton balls. But that didn’t do very much. Instead, he replaced his fan assembly with a shop vac. Then he examined what was on the cotton balls.

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No Caffeine, No Problem: A Hand-Soldered Chip-Scale Package

June 26, 2018 by Dan Maloney 47 Comments

It’s said that the electronic devices we use on a daily basis, particularly cell phones, could be so much smaller than they are if only the humans they’re designed for weren’t so darn big and clumsy. That’s only part of the story — battery technology has a lot to do with overall device size — but it’s true that chips can be made a whole lot smaller than they are currently, and are starting to bump into the limit of being able to handle them without mechanical assistance.

Or perhaps not, if [mitxela]’s hand-soldering of a tiny ball-grid array chip is any guide. While soldering wires directly to a chip is certainly a practical skill and an impressive one at that, this at least dips its toe into the “just showing off” category. And we heartily endorse that. The chip is an ATtiny20 in a WLCSP (wafer-level chip-scale package) that’s a mere 1.5 mm by 1.4 mm. The underside of the chip has twelve tiny solder balls in a staggered 4×6 array with 0.4 mm pitch. [mitxela] tackled the job of soldering this chip to a 2.54-mm pitch breakout board using individual strands from #30 AWG stranded wire and a regular soldering iron, with a little Kapton tape to hold the chip down. Through the microscope, the iron tip looks enormous, and while we know the drop of solder on the tip was probably minuscule we still found ourselves mentally wiping it off as he worked his way across the array. In the end, all twelve connections were brought out to the protoboard, and the chip powers up successfully.

We’re used to seeing [mitxela] work at a much larger scale, like his servo-plucked music box or a portable Jacob’s Ladder. He’s been known to get small before though, too, like with these tiny blinkenlight earrings.

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