ts-100

4 Articles

Pine Made Phones, Laptops, And Now… Soldering Irons?

July 22, 2020 by 37 Comments

The TS100 smart soldering iron may have some new competition. Pine — the people best known for Linux-based phones and laptops — though the world needed another smart soldering iron so they announced the Pinecil — Sort of a knock off of the TS100. It looks like a TS100 and uses the same tips. But it does have some important differences.

It used to be a soldering iron was a pretty simple affair. Plug in one end; don’t touch the other end. But, eventually, things got more complicated and you wanted some way to make it hotter or cooler. Then you wanted the exact temperature with a PID controller. However, until recently, you didn’t care how much processing power your soldering iron had. The TS100 changed that. The smart and portable iron was a game-changer and people not only used it for soldering, but also wrote software to make it do other things. One difference is that the device has a RISC-V CPU. Reportedly, it also has better ergonomics and a USB C connector that allows for UART, I2C, SPI, and USB connections. It also has a very friendly price tag of $24.99.

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DIY Power Supply And TS100 Outlet Combo Shows Off Great Layout

March 19, 2018 by 18 Comments

Here’s a combination of two important electronics workbench tools into a single, cleanly-assembled unit. [uGen] created a DC power supply complete with a plug for the popular TS100 soldering iron, and it looks great! Most of the main components are familiar offerings, like a LM2596 DC to DC buck converter board and a DPS3003 adjustable DC power supply unit (we previously covered a DIY power supply based around the similar DPS5005.) The enclosure is an economical, featureless desktop instrument case whose panels were carefully cut to fit the necessary components. There’s one limitation to the combo: the unit uses a switch to either power an attached TS100 iron, or act as a general DC power supply. It cannot do both at once. So long as one doesn’t mind that limitation, it’s a nice bundle made from very affordable components.

It’s easy for something to look like a hack job, but to look clean and professional involves thoughtful measurement, planning, and assembly. Fortunately, [uGen] has supplied all the drawings and bill of materials for the project so there’s no need to start from scratch. Also, don’t forget that if the capabilities of the DPS power supply units leave you wanting a bit more, there is alternative firmware in the form of OpenDPS; it even offers a remote control feature by adding an ESP8266.

Part Soldering Iron, Part Hand-Held Oscilloscope

September 28, 2017 by 27 Comments

If you are in the market for a temperature controlled soldering iron, an attractive choice of the moment is the TS-100 iron available by mail-order from China. This is an all-in-one iron with a digital temperature controller built into its handle, featuring a tiny OLED display. It’s lightweight, reasonable quality, and all its design and software are available and billed as open source (Though when we reviewed it we couldn’t find an open source licence accompanying the code.) This combination has resulted in it becoming a popular choice, and quite a few software hacks have appeared for it.

The latest one to come our way is probably best described as coming from the interface between genius and insanity without meaning to disparage the  impressive achievement of its author. [Befinitiv] has implemented a working oscilloscope on a TS-100, that uses the soldering iron tip as a probe and the OLED as a display. It requires a small modification to the hardware to bring the iron contact into an ADC pin on the microcontroller, and there is currently no input protection on it so the iron could easily be fried, but it works.

It is strongly suggested in the write-up that this isn’t a production-ready piece of work and that you shouldn’t put it on your iron. At least, not without that input protection and maybe a resistive divider. But for all that it’s still an impressive piece of work, a working soldering iron that becomes a ‘scope on a menu selection. Take a look at the ‘scope-iron in action, we’ve posted a video below the break.

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Hakko FX-901: Better Than TS-100?

September 12, 2017 by 45 Comments

You’ve surely seen the TS-100 soldering iron. It has an OLED display, an ARM processor, and will run with an external battery pack. They are not too pricey, but at $80 or so they aren’t exactly an impulse buy, either. [Drone Camps RC] used one in the field and decided to try a Hakko FX-901 instead. He did a video review that you can see below.

The FX-901 is about half the price of a TS-100. Granted, it doesn’t have a fancy display and you can’t hack it to play Tetris. However, it does take batteries (including rechargeable) without an external pack. The manufacturer claims up to two hours of use and that it will melt solder in 40 seconds. From the video, the iron actually melted solder in under 30 seconds. The two hours, by the way, is with rechargeables. Alkaline AA batteries should give about 70 minutes of operation.

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