Last goodie for today is a dual headed vacuum pickup pen. A pump creates a vacuum to the pin. Set it down on a part and cover the small hole in the side of the pen to suck up the part. Position and then release by removing a finger from the vent hole. This was probably $10 but might have been $7.
Here’s a summary of major developments over the last week. Free PCB Friday is coming up soon.
Coming up:
A PCB preheater warms boards before removing parts for repair. This makes it easier and less traumatic to remove big parts like smd voltage regulators, TQFP and BGA chips. The hot plate can serve dual use as a preheater, but as the preheater manual explains this won’t work for PCBs with placement on both ends. This isn’t really a must have, but since seeing one in Bunnies workshop we’ve been on the lookout for one. List price was about 40 bucks before negotiation.
We’re not the only ones getting our boxes from Susie Shipper in Shenzhen. Akiba @ freaklabs got a bunch of soldering and rework stations for a new hackerspace in Akihabara Tokyo.
Got my gear from my shipper in Shenzhen today. fast. :) (thx @dangerousproto)
Continue reading “Shipping from Shenzhen arrives at FreakLabs too”
This is a air driven solder paste dispenser with suck back for precise solder droplets. Size of droplets and repeat interval are set on the front panel. Dip switches on the back control 16 different modes.
Seems to be exactly the same at similar 983a dispensers on aliexpress but a whole lot cheaper in Shenzhen. Manual is Chinese only but the good parts are translated over at eevblog forum.
Solder dispenses when the foot pedal is pressed. Pretty typical. But it also has a finger trigger that slides over the solder syringe. Didn’t notice that when I bought it.
This needs an air compressor with at least 70psi but preferably 100psi. That won’t get here until tomorrow.
Should have board preheater, paste dispenser and part suction pickup things. Ordered the air compressor for the dispenser 5 minutes past deadline for delivery today so this will get tested tomorrow.
Nice solder job with peak temp at 200, no noticeable scorching on the pcb. Oven must run a bit hot. Need a thermocouple to do some more testing.
Cranked the solder temperature down to 210 and tried some boards with bigger parts. Still looking good, though the paste dispenser will help a lot as the tweezers aren’t the right tool. The lower solder temperature still scorches the boards making the tidy white silk a sort of blond roux color. That is a lingering concern and something we need to work out.
We received tools and tested the reflow oven and hot plate. Added a tools section to the forum, you can get the PDF versoin of the reflow oven manual there. The workshop video of the tool unboxing was made.
We purchased an air-compressor for the solder paste dispenser, and got to clear almost all back mail.
We implemented the UART debugging mode for the Bus Pirate v4 we talked about yesterday. All you need to do is add ‘#define BPV4_DEBUG’ to the ‘base.h’ file, and your next Bus Pirate v4 compile will transfer the communication from the USB to the UART on the AUX1 and AUX2 pins.
Here is an open source ATmega325 development board designed by Dilshan. The board includes a crystal oscillator circuit for the MCU, a MAX232 serial driver, hardware reset button, and breakouts for all the MCU pins.
This post is about simple Atmega325 development board which I was designed and build to test some large AVR systems. This development board contains ATmega325 MCU and MAX232 base RS232 driver/receiver unit. Thanks to SMD packages and components dimensions of this board get limited to 85mm x 62mm. This development board requires 5V external power supply and all its external circuitries (RS232 driver and hardware CPU reset) can be enable/disable through on-board jumpers.
If you’re like us then your desk is always a total mess of microcontroller programmers, prototype PCBs, wires, tools, etc… This article covers a few tips and tricks on how to tidy up your workspace. While the article is written for heavier tools and equipment than what we use, there are some cool universal tips in there like the boxes hanging above and the retractable muffin tray (both pictured above).
Reflowed two 0805 caps on two qfp protoboards. One at 250 and one at 240c.p Both took about 30 seconds to reflow. Anyone know the optimal temp for crappy old lead solder paste? Board at 250 looks scorched but that could be from the reflow oven instead. Will do a second test to find out.
Unboxing a shipment of tools we sent back from hua qiang bei electronics market in Shenzhen, China. We got a test rig which will help us standardize manufacture testing for our boards. We got two tools for solderpaste reflowing, one is a digitally controlled hot plate, and the other is a reflow oven with programmable preheat, reflow, and cool down time and temperature settings.
Mats stumbled upon another cheap PCB fab house. The pricing and PCB limitations are comparable with Seeed and Itead. With each PCB order they offer a solder past stencil for an extra $25. We also noticed that they offer part sourcing, and PCB assembly services even in low quantities.
Worked great soldering two caps to a proto board with old crappy lead solder paste. No adjustment or levitating the board with other boards or any funny business. Need to try a full board to see it really in action.
Popped a couple caps on a qfp proto board and started a reflow cycle. Dry run went OK. Unit was dropped pretty bad. Frame is out of whack and drawer bent. Seems to still work. Not sure if damage is shipping or existing as I didnt have time to test and inspect in the market. Shame on me. Still seems to work. Much like the t9xx units the timer does seem to be a little slow compared to a stopwatch.
Bus Pirate v4 is back in stock at Seeed Studio. The Bus Pirate is an open source hacker multi-tool that talks to electronic stuff. It’s got a bunch of features an intrepid hacker might need to prototype their next project.
v4 has some great new features, but if you want a tool that “just works” the v3 is still your best bet.
You can get a Bus Pirate v4 for $40, including worldwide shipping.
This is the second and biggest batch of stuff we sent from Shenzhen.
Sorry for the delay, there are 300 read-but-not-replied emails that came in during the Shenzhen trip last. Today is all about getting that backlog cleared, at least until FedEx drops off the next batch of toys – then it’s video time!
jechavarria recently received a Digital Paddleclock PCB in the giveaway and wrote a post on his blog detailing its assembly and operation.
Via the contact form.
