Everyone needs a helping hand in the shop once in a while, and most of us have gone the traditional route and bought one of those little doohickies with the cast iron base and adjustable arms terminated in alligator clips.
via Coolant Hoses Retasked to Lend a Helping Hand — Hackaday
Timothy Woo has launched a Indiegogo campaign to manufacture his open-source, Arduino-compatible, wireless PCB reflow oven controller:
Reflowduino is the first completely open-source, Arduino-compatible reflow oven controller of its kind that enables practically anyone to assemble their own beautiful circuit boards at home!
Reflowduino comes loaded with features, all in a compact Arduino-compatible package, with full documentation, example code, demo app, and comprehensive wiki on Github.
Reflowduino is designed to be extremely easy to use! The general concept is to switch the power of the appliance on or off with a solid-state relay as shown below, measuring the temperature by placing the thermocouple tip inside the oven during the whole process.
If nothing else, please share this campaign to your friends, family, and anyone who might be interested on social media! Remember that every view counts for me, and I’m depending on you to make this happen!
Dan Maloney writes on Hackaday about Timothy Woo’s Reflowduino:
Face it — you want a reflow oven. Even the steadiest hands and best eyes only yield “meh” results with a manual iron on SMD boards, and forget about being able to scale up to production. But what controller should you use when you build your oven, and what features should it support? Don’t worry…
Dubbed the Reflowduino for obvious reasons, Timothy Woo’s Hackaday Prize entry has everything you need in a reflow oven controller, and a few things you never knew you needed.
Sean Hodgins has a great tutorial on surface mount soldering:
Decide how you want to assemble your SMD Challenge Kit (re, the video) you can choose to use a soldering iron, or a reflow oven. They take about the same amount of time but using the soldering iron can be a little more challenging and doesn’t require a cheap toaster oven.
Parts:
Tools:
We are proud to be a sponsor of this Maker Faire Orlando soldering kit:
For the past six years at Maker Faire Orlando, members of FamiLab have taught attendees how to solder with a cool little Makey pin with 2 self-flashing LEDs. We’ve been asked for more advanced soldering training, and we responded with the addition of a PIC-microcontroller-based board twinkling several LEDs, and with a switch that can be used to change the LED display pattern.
We opted to design the board such that it can be used as a pendant on a necklace (lanyard) or as a keychain (especially for those of you who like large keychains). The design is a scalloped 2.7″ circle with LEDs on the outside circle, and a hole at the top for a keyring. Batteries are on the back of the board.
Resources
This Saturday, September 2nd, we will have one day workshop for assembling the Tinusaur kits for those who supported our Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign. It will take place in Varna, Bulgaria, our host will be VarnaLab – the local hackerspace. We will learn the basics of electronic components, microcontrollers – ATtiny85 in particular and, of course, […]
via Workshop: Assembling the Tinusaur Kit in Varna, Bulgaria — The Tinusaur Project
From Ken Olsen of MakersBox on Hackaday.io:
If you like happy, easy to build projects, this is not for you. This is only for people who like to grind their teeth and pull out hair.
Be warned that trying to hand solder a 0201 package may be considered evidence of insanity and get you committed to bad places by your loved ones or arch nemesis.
Here’s a video of the board in operation:
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…
We think of helping hands as those little alligator clips on a metal stand. They are cheap and fall over, so we tend to buy them and don’t use them. However, if you are willing to put $35 or $40 into it, you can get the newer kind that have–well–tentacles–on a heavy base. [Archie_slap] didn’t…
OSH Park 