Collaborate Disseminate
Applying solder paste to a new custom PCB is always a little nerve-racking. One slip of the hand, and you have a smeared mess to clean up. To make this …read more Continue reading Portable Solder Paste Station Prevents Smears With Suction
Battlelines are being drawn in Canada over the lowly Flipper Zero, a device seen by some as an existential threat to motor vehicle owners across the Great White North. The …read more Continue reading Hackaday Links: March 31, 2024
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 …read more Continue reading Solder Two Boards at Once With This Dual Reflow Plate
Sometimes there are moments when an engineer has to use whatever materials they have to hand in order to complete the job on time. Such a situation arose at the …read more Continue reading Making a Solder Paste Stencil From What You Have On Hand
While using a stencil should make solder paste application onto PCBs a simple affair, there are a number of “gotchas” that make it more art than science. Luckily, there are …read more Continue reading Stencil Vacuum-Assist Helps Avoid the Heartbreak of Smeared Solder Paste
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
PCB stencils make application of solder paste a snap, but there’s a long, fussy way to go before the paste goes on. You’ve got to come up with some way to accurately align the stencil over the board, which more often than not involves a jury-rigged setup using tape and …read more
Continue reading Adjustable Jig Eases PCB Stencil Alignment Process
[NixieGuy] was scheming to build robots with cable-driven joints when the pandemic hit. Now that component sourcing is scarce, he’s had to get creative when it comes to continuous cables. These cables need to be as seamless as possible to avoid getting caught on the pulleys, so [Nixie] came up …read more
[Jan Mrázek]’s success with 3D printing a solder paste stencil is awfully interesting, though he makes it clear that it is only a proof of concept. There are a lot of parts to this hack, so let’s step through them one at a time.
First of all, it turns out …read more
Continue reading Can Solder Paste Stencils be 3D Printed? They can!