Collaborate Disseminate
Sometimes you notice something small that nevertheless you can’t explain. [Greg Davill] found himself in just such a situation this week when he noticed some green LEDs glowing dimly when …read more Continue reading Mystery Effect Causing LEDs To Glow During Reflow
It’s not too hard to make your electronics project get warm. Design your traces too small, accidentally short the battery inputs together, maybe reverse the voltage going to your MCU. …read more Continue reading Using a PCB to Reflow PCBs – Take 2!
Few things have changed our workshops more than surface mount components. In 1980 it would have been strange to see a hobby bench with a microscope, hot air equipment, tweezers, …read more Continue reading Iron Becomes SMD Hot Plate
You can do your own Surface Mount Technology based PCB assembly with just a handful of tools and some patience. At the heart of my SMT process is stopping to inspect the various steps all while trying to maintain a …read more
Continue reading Learn Bil Herd’s DIY Surface Mount Assembly Process
There are a ton of ways to go about building your own reflow oven. Most of these builds start with, well, an oven — usually a toaster oven — with a small but significant minority choosing to modify a hotplate. But this might be the first time we’ve seen a …read more
Continue reading Turning a Waffle Iron into a Reflow Station
Few things excite a Hackaday staff member more than a glowing LED, so it should be no surprise that combining them together into a matrix really gets us going. Make that matrix tiny, addressable, and chainable and you know it’ll be a hit at the virtual water cooler. We’ve seen …read more
Imagine having a surface mount kit that you’d like to stencil with solder paste and reflow solder, but which doesn’t come with a solder stencil. That was what faced [Honghong Lu], and she rose to the challenge by taking a piece of PET sheet cut from discarded packaging and hand-cutting …read more
Continue reading Who Says Solder Paste Stencils Have To Be CNC Cut?
With reflow soldering, sometimes close is good enough. At the end of the day, the home gamer really just needs a hot plate or an old toaster oven and a calibrated Mark I eyeball to get decent results. This exhaust fan-equipped reflow oven is an attempt to take control of …read more
Continue reading Exhaust Fan-Equipped Reflow Oven Cools PCBs Quickly
Oregon State University must be a pretty good place to go to school if you want to hack on robots. Their robotics club, which looks active and impressive, has a multi-part video series on how to solder surface mount components that is worth watching. [Anthony] is the team lead for …read more
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 …read more
Continue reading Building A Compact Reflow Oven With Halogen Lamps