I got my T962A reflow oven I ordered from EBay today. It's the big brother of the T962, with a significantly larger internal area.
It came incredibly well packaged, practically embalmed in bubble wrap. Included was the oven itself, a power cord with european plug, and an international adapter. Inside the oven was a spare fuse and manuals. The adapter seems incredibly shonky - twice it caused the oven to cut out at a bad time - and it doesn't have a ground pin, so I don't recommend using it.
The oven has a graphic LCD display and five buttons labeled F1-F4 and S ('start'). The interface is fairly clear and self explanatory, and was set to english when I got it. Internally, there are four IR elements, along with two thermocouples kind of dangling down from the roof of the oven.
I set up a test run with some spare PCBs with a couple of 0805 resistors on each. I put one in the middle of the oven, one in the back corner, one in the front corner, and one along the side, then set the oven to its default profile number 1.
As the oven runs, it plots the actual temperature against the expected profile with little + signs. It's definitely Bang-Bang rather than PWM, but I can't be sure if it uses PID or not. Either way, the temperature sticks fairly close to the profile. It is fairly simple, however, which leads to absurdities like it turning the fan on to cool the oven down at the start of a second run, because it was too hot according to the profile.
Peering through the window, I could watch the boards reflow. The one in the center reflowed quickly, followed by the ones at the back and the side. The one near the front took a while longer, but did eventually reflow. I'd tentatively say that the entire area of this oven is usable for soldering, in contrast to what I've heard of the smaller one.
Once the reflow is over, it enters a fan forced mode, which ejects hot air out the bottom. This is liable to make the surface it's resting on very hot. I use a wooden desk, however, and didn't notice any scorching, but you may want to take care all the same.
Some people have commented about issues with button debounce on these units. I haven't noticed any issues, but it does seem to scan the keyboard relatively infrequently - no more than 1-2hz - so often you have to hold a key in for a second or so before it registers it. Given the cost, and its apparent effectiveness, that's a compromise I'm willing to put up with.
All in all, I'm pretty happy with it. I will report back after reflowing something more complex than a few passives and SMD trimpots.
Thanks for sharing, I can't wait to hear more.
No complaints about fumes? I read many of them of the T962 in sparkfun and adafruit forums, and get that question frequently about mine.
Does it have a circulating fan inside to keep the temperature even?
Once the reflow is over, it enters a fan forced mode, which ejects hot air out the bottom. This is liable to make the surface it's resting on very hot. I use a wooden desk, however, and didn't notice any scorching, but you may want to take care all the same.
I read about this too. I saw a T962 in china and it had the same big fan on the back as my Qinsi. Do you also have that, it just blows out the bottom, or is there a fan on the bottom?
[quote author="ian"]Thanks for sharing, I can't wait to hear more.
No complaints about fumes? I read many of them of the T962 in sparkfun and adafruit forums, and get that question frequently about mine.[/quote]
It certainly puts some out; a little while it's operating then a lot when the fan turns on. I didn't mention it because it seems like an inevitable consequence of running a reflow oven.
Does it have a circulating fan inside to keep the temperature even?
I'm not sure. There's a small fan that runs the whole time the oven has power, but I don't think it's recirculating. My guess is no.
Once the reflow is over, it enters a fan forced mode, which ejects hot air out the bottom. This is liable to make the surface it's resting on very hot. I use a wooden desk, however, and didn't notice any scorching, but you may want to take care all the same.
I read about this too. I saw a T962 in china and it had the same big fan on the back as my Qinsi. Do you also have that, it just blows out the bottom, or is there a fan on the bottom?
It has vents on the back, but when I ran it all the heat seemed to emerge from the bottom. I'll take a closer look at its physical construction.
[quote author="ian"]
No complaints about fumes? I read many of them of the T962 in sparkfun and adafruit forums, and get that question frequently about mine.
[/quote]
I run my pizza oven under a kitchen hood with a pipe to outside. After my first board she said I must install that, and I couldn't really argue.
I am very interested in hearing more. I recently purchased a $650 industrial hot plate but it is not as ideal as I thought it would be. I want to reflow boards that have ~80 components on them. Mostly small caps and resistors plus TQFP and VFQFN chips. the boards are only about 130x95mm so they will fit fine in here and I am very okay with just doing one at a time too. I just think this would hopefully be a better solution than the hot plate at least. (Considering I may actually save 200 when I return the hot plate it is very appealing.) Also, I assume they have probably changed the design some since 2009 when these units first began to appear, which is when a lot of the reviews were written, (also mostly about the T962, not the T962A).
Does this have 2 or 4 tubes? I can't seem to find that info. I did find this review, but I can't seem to find the model he discusses:
http://dangerousprototypes.com/2013/02/ ... i-qs-5100/ (http://dangerousprototypes.com/2013/02/14/workshop-video-55-infrared-reflow-oven-qinsi-qs-5100/)
Thanks for sharing! You have given me hope that this is a viable solution.
The model I have has four tubes; it was the first thing I checked.
[quote author="sublime"] I recently purchased a $650 industrial hot plate but it is not as ideal as I thought it would be.[/quote]
How did the hotplate turn out to be less than ideal? I'm debating the T962A vs homemade PID controlled 24x24" hot plate right now for boards (panels actually) about 14x14" - it'd be great to hear why the hot plate isn't working out like you thought it would.
Thanks,
Erik
Just received my T962 from China.
Had a problem solved witht 2 emails with the seller ( not the manuf. company)
The problem resides in the power cable..
For the amount and for the numbers of those cables i have in reserve( many old computer power cables that went right in the coburt when i changed computer) i was able to test. It was only that.
It works fine just to select the wave the temp, and other.
Peace of mind : put the pcb in be sur toselect the rigth temp, and off
it goes.
Small but good enough for my little lab.
Hi everyone,
My first post here - I hope it goes down well... ;-)
My company, ESTechnical, have just launched a controller upgrade for the T962 and T962A ovens, because we found the controller to be rather poor. The heat was very uneven and the oven burned our boards whilst still not reflowing the solder in some places.
The controller upgrade is easy to fit and dramatically improves these ovens. Using our new controllers the oven is very easy to adjust to suit your needs and the heat is much more even thanks to careful control.
You can save and recall up to 32 profiles to/from the EEPROM memory of the controller and it offers PID control of the fan and heat output.
These controllers are available on ebay, but I cannot post a link in my first post... The ebay number is 190827607864 and I will post a link when I am allowed to by the forum!
I hope that this helps someone out!
Best regards,
Ed
-- edited the URL
http://http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/190827607864
[quote author="estechnical"]Hi everyone,
My first post here - I hope it goes down well... ;-)
My company, ESTechnical, have just launched a controller upgrade for the T962 and T962A ovens, because we found the controller to be rather poor. The heat was very uneven and the oven burned our boards whilst still not reflowing the solder in some places.
The controller upgrade is easy to fit and dramatically improves these ovens. Using our new controllers the oven is very easy to adjust to suit your needs and the heat is much more even thanks to careful control.
You can save and recall up to 32 profiles to/from the EEPROM memory of the controller and it offers PID control of the fan and heat output.
These controllers are available on ebay, but I cannot post a link in my first post... The ebay number is 190800441302 and I will post a link when I am allowed to by the forum!
I hope that this helps someone out!
Best regards,
Ed[/quote]
Very nice. I'm curious, though, why replace the current display with a less capable character display?
Also, if I may say, it's rather expensive, at over a third the price of the T962A itself, nearly as expensive as the T962.
Is it OSHW?
Hi, thanks for looking...
There are a number of reasons that our controller upgrade is the way it is... first, the original graphical display is basically surplus since the graph doesn't match the actual temperature in the oven (and the GUI is really not very usable in the stock controller) and the time displayed by the original control is not correct too...
Personally, I like function over form! The controller performance is where the bulk of the effort was concentrated, there is an easy to use menu for adjusting parameters and the controller tracks the profile very well. I prefer text based displays for editing parameters, and the controller can easily be attached to an FTDI cable to a computer to log the temperature data and display a graph (this little application is coming soon as an extra).
The hardware is designed to be accurate above all else, the thermocouples are measured by dedicated ICs with cold-junction compensation, for the best accuracy. Quality parts and boards are used too...
The price reflects the amount of work that went into producing the controller, we have spent time and money on correcting problems with someone else's design(!) and we need to recover the costs of doing this. You really do get what you pay for with reflow ovens, if the control was better in the T962(A) ovens in the first place they would be quite good, but unfortunately, they are really let down by the original control.
We feel that the upgraded ovens now perform as well as the $$$$+ ovens that the likes of Madell sell, so the price of a T962/T962A plus one of our controllers really does represent a good deal.
The new listing for the controllers is here: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/190827607864 (http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/190827607864) and we also now sell the T962A reflow oven ready fitted with our upgrade - http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/190823838689 (http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/190823838689)
Best regards,
Ed
Ed, does your retrofit controller support both lead and lead free temp profiles?
Wayne
Hi Wayne,
Yes, it it completely programmable using the menu. You'd just need to set the desired temperatures for the soak and peak stages of the cycle. I can program the controller with a good starting point for lead solder reflow if you remind me at time of purchase that you're using lead solder.
You can edit:
Ramp up rate
Soak temperature
Soak duration
Peak temperature
Peak duration
Ramp down rate
You can edit, save and load up to 32 different sets of profile settings. By default, all profiles are the same settings, which are a for pb-free soldering.
Thanks,
Ed
There is now a git repository for the code and instructions for the ESTechnical reflow controller upgrade here: https://github.com/estechnical/reflowOvenController (https://github.com/estechnical/reflowOvenController) and the controller is available here: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/190827607864 (http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/190827607864)
I hope that this makes the controller more useful among the hacker world - now you can tweak it yourself (not that it needs tweaking to be a great controller in the first place! :-) ).
We have determined that this controller can also be fitted to the T962C reflow oven as well as T962 and T962A.
Best regards,
Ed
Hello again,
ESTechnical now have a new website with a forum, it would be great to move discussion of these reflow ovens to http://www.estechnical.co.uk/forum (http://www.estechnical.co.uk/forum).
We also now sell the reflow controller upgrade and reflow ovens (ready to use, fitted with out upgrade) on the ESTechnical website.
I look forward to hearing from you soon!
Best,
Ed
i need some information for the above item.
We are a computer and mobile phone repair shop and we repair laptop and mobile phone motherboards, for example GPU on the laptop main-board we fix by applying certain heat by hot air gun and applying flux on it reflowing process, and liquid damaged mobile phone main-board we do ultrasonic cleaning and then heat the main-board to reflow.
My understanding of this machine is that while doing the reflow manually we can just put the laptop board in this oven set the right time and heat setting and it will reflow the soldering on the ic and chips? am i right? if this is correct i will buy the machine and is it compatible with voltage in new zealand?
hoping to hear from you soon?
It will reflow all the components. So you better make sure that all the components can handle the heat. Like speakers, vibraters, connectors or you'll have to remove those components first and then reflow.