It should be a small error, I will fix it as soon as possible
It seems this error sometimes happens when coming out of the menu. Maybe in the background, the timer is already counting down to Sleep when in Menu, but only for the HT/ST indicator on the display?
I was just about quick enough to catch the ST vs HT display error I mentioned. I was almost too late but if you look carefully, you see that on the first second of the video, the temp is still on holder temp (252 C). The display is on ST
Can I upload a video? This situation has never happened to me
Will try to catch is next time. It has not happened again until now.
Also, when having "Holder" to "ON", sleep does not seem to work. Only holder temp. Not sure if that is normal, I always had the holder set to AUTO previously, and in that setting Sleep works. So it might be the actual difference as intended, but I never tried it in the original FW tbh
Is there a setting to influence the BEEP behaviour? Your FW beeps on all temp setting changes, including sleep temp, and I am not sure I like that :-)
I understand that usage of your modified FW is at own risk, but seeing your station working well, i'd have no problem trying it out. Soo if you could put it on Google drive that would be great!
Is the firmware still able to detect all irons automatically, and will the automatic power regulation still work? Or is your FW adapted to work with your transformer with multiple secondary windings only?
it is strange that this problem has not been noticed for a long time.
I have been updating FW via USB on 5.2C without issues, not sure what problem you encountered that needed an updated bootloader? I suspect that whatever the issue was, not everybody suffered from it (like I do not), so there were no reports of the issue before.
So now the noise is normal and I am on the bad side that I do not have noise at all? Since I am getting older and maybe my hearing is not that good I have invested in a Stethoscope Noise Amplifier which is 1000x better than putting a plastic tube to your ear, doing this test during Unisolder C245 and C210 I get dead silence maybe my toroidal is a premium build I guess.
I suggest that do your diagnostics well before ignoring the noise.
I do not need a stethoscope for further testing, trust me. The noise is from the transformer, no doubt about it. This is of course not normal and not ideal, but still not something I will worry about too much for now. There is nothing I can do about it other than replacing the transformer, but I will not do that in a hurry when there is no risk of catastrophic failure of the transformer, which does not seem likely after reading the clear explanation from Sparky.
Good to know that the noise is not a sign if imminent failure of any component, but can be explained logically within the expected performance range of the device. I will just keep the existing toroid then, as the performance is perfectly fine apart from the ticking noise.
As I said several times already, the controller works with pretty nasty/low quality transformers. I do have one that has pretty large leakage inductance, producing pretty nasty inductive peaks. But the controller works with it wothout a problem. I spent pretty big amount of time tunning the firmware to withstand this without problem. I also tested it chinese with non-toroidal power power transformer - nothing dramatic either, more than
But still, IMHO, a toroidal transformer with decent quality is the best power source for this project. One look at the oscillograms around power switching, especially on 1/2, 1/4 and 1/8 power tells pretty much everything about this.
It's exactly at less than full power that the issue with noise from my toroidal transformer occurs. I might have gotten a dud then.
Original quality parts can't be cheap, buying a cheap thing is not worth counting on the quality. The seller is not responsible for your choice, it offers the product and the price, and it's up to you to decide whether to buy or not.
The seller however is responsible to produce working, reliable boards, is it not? Regardless of price. If you cannot guarantee reliability at a certain price point, your price point is too low.
Of course, with these DIY type of things, it's hard to judge whether it's the fault of the seller or whether the buyer messed up something. But looking at the number of incidents on this forum alone with Tindie boards, I start to wonder.
If I ever decide to sell off one of my sets, I at least know they have been working flawlessly for several weeks/months. Of course I do realize it's not realistic to stress test multiple boards if you sell on a larger scale.
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