Soldering Iron Driver

From DP

File:SID LP front.jpg

Universal Soldering Iron Driver capable of driving both thermocouple and PTC type soldering irons.

Read about the design.

[Available for $7.00] at Seeed Studio.

Contents 1 Features 2 Hardware 3 How-to 4 Tested soldering irons 5 Firmware 6 Development resources 7 Download 8 Resources 9 License

Features

Project Summary
Name:	Soldering Iron Driver
Buy it:	[ Get one for $7.00 at Seeed Studio]
Price:	$7.00
Status:	[[Project status#Development_status|]]
Manufacturing:	Shipping
Forum:	[ Soldering Iron Driver Forum]

The Soldering Iron Controller was designed by Arhi (Bogdan Kecman) and shared under public domain in our forums. With his consent we developed our through hole version based on the 3rd generation of his driver.

From the get go the Soldering Iron Driver was conceived to drive Hakko 900M (clones) and Solomon irons. As an added bonus it was discovered Weller PES51 irons were compatible as well.

The key to this universal design is the analog front-end which is capable of reading both Thermocouple and PTC temperature sensors. The SID features:

• Compatible with any PTC or TC soldering iron.
• PID temperature control.
• USB data transfer, and firmware update.
• UART data transfer.
• HD44780 2x16 character LCD.
• external NTC temperature sensor, for calibration and better cold junction compensation of TC type sensors.
• Low noise, zero crossing AC heater control.

Hardware

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The hardware was developed by Arhi in the forum. His initial gen1 design used a PIC16F690 soldered on a perfboard. Since then he moved to the PIC18F2550 in gen2 and gen3. Images below are of gen2(left) and gen3 right), pictured above is our through hole version of gen3.

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• Soldering Iron Driver design overview

How-to

• Original (Arhi's) design forum thread
• Dangerous Prototypes v1.5 forum thread

Tested soldering irons

• Hakko 900 series, and clones (PTC sensor)
  • HAKKO 907 iron
  • HAKKO 908 iron
  • QUICK 907A iron (HAKKO clone, different characteristics of the sensor)
  • GORDAK iron (HAKKO clone, different characteristics of the sensor)
  • ATTEN iron (HAKKO clone, different characteristics of the sensor)
  • NONAME HAKKO clone (identical RTD characteristics)

• Solomon SL/HQ irons (Thermocouple sensor
  • SOLOMON SL 10
  • SOLOMON HQ 10
  • SOLOMON HQ 30

• Weller PES51 (Thermocouple sensor)

Firmware

There are two versions of the firmware, one for controlling the device with buttons, another for controlling it via an encoder.

• Button SID firmware
• Encoder SID firmware

Development resources

• Patrick: Soldering iron driver v1 development
• Soldering iron driver v1.5 development forum
• Original Soldering iron controller gen 1-3 forum project log
  • Soldering Iron Controller gen1, and gen2
  • Soldering Iron Controller gen3

Download

• Soldering Iron Driver (DP version1.5) eagle files and gerbers in our SVN
• Firmware, and Arhi's hardware at source forge

Resources

• Hakko 900M
• Solomon HQ and SL irons
• Weller PES51
• Thermocouple
• PTC Thermistor
• Reading K-type, and ptc (app note, ask arhi about it
• PIC 18F2550 datasheet
• PIC 18F reference manual [PDF!]
• Microchip C18 C compiler
• Microchip USB stack
• Diolan USB PIC bootloader

License

• Hardware: CC-0 (public domain)
• Firmware: CC-AL (Creative Commons Attribution License)