Today is hardware building day. I'm putting together another 5 boards. Here's a work in progress shot showing the 11 components on the front being soldered on.
Discussion
And here are the finished products. All tested and verified to work properly.
3/5 were perfect on the first try and the other 2 were fine after a little rework.
Hey friend, would you please tell me the source for the little hot plate you're using for your surface mount soldering?🤔🧐😀🙏🏻💖❓
I got it from c0pperdragon on Tindie. They don't make/sell them anymore, but the designs are public in case you want to build your own.
https://www.tindie.com/products/c0pperdragon/hot-plate/
https://github.com/c0pperdragon/HotPlate
I want another one myself, but I've been hoping someone else might pick up this project so I can just buy one instead of ordering custom PCBs, sourcing all the components, finding out a bunch of them are not compatible, ordering more components... you get the idea (or if you've done this before, it's more like "you know the drill")
Thanks for the deets...🙏🏻👍😀
I've seen SMT done in toaster ovens, but this tool looks awesome.💖
Oh it's absolutely amazing. That's why I am still considering doing a production run, despite the costs that'd be involved
It's a very slick design. Would be sweet to add programmable temperature profiling... I wonder if there are any suitable off-the-shelf temperature elements available anywhere?🤔
As lomg as you are willing to count clock cycles, I imagine that could be programmed into the MCU without much trouble.
I'm not gonna test that with my only hot plate though. Haha
And I did look into building a batch of these a while back and I don't know how c0pperdragon was hitting that price point!
I estimated like $45/each in parts alone for a batch of 10.
It'd be about $130 in parts for one unit (mainly because the PCBs, stand-offs and screws are only available in bulk, shipping from at least 4ndifferent suppliere, a UPDI programmer... it adds up fast)
I don't want to spend $450 on parts to build my one hot plate and then have 9 extras left over that I have to try to sell.