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Soldering with a Toaster Oven
nullset sent in a link to the Seattle Robotics Society about soldering in an unconventional way. Instead of the traditional soldering iron, Kenneth Maxon has successfully used a toaster oven to solder surface mount parts. The "magic ingredient" that facilitates this is a water-soluble solder paste. I wish I'd thought of this back when I had to solder one of those *ahem* aftermarket accessories to my playstation, since the whole process looks easier than trying to hold a soldering iron steady.
Your motherboard has finished. Don't forget to ground it properly!
haha...using microwaves to cure cancer?
Pentium motherboard in Pentium 4 motherboard out.
Seems simple enough, where can I buy one?
What isnt a toaster good for?
(I regretfully ask)
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I have read about this on another web site before. Its not a new technique, I have even thought of trying it before, except I dont have a toaster oven.
-Brandon
Quitters never win, Winners never quit, But those who never win and never quit are idiots.
I've never seen a toster overn big enough for a Playstation. I could just see someone putting the whole Playstation/XBOX in the oven which often defaults to 350F. 30 minutes later melted XBOX Pie
Some already use solder paste when fitting mod chips to consoles. You can dip the wire into it and give it a quick blast of heat while pressing the wire against the connection point.
soldering in an unconventional way
sorry but industry has been doing the solderpaste->heated oven dance for years now.
it's unconventional to use a hand held iron unless you are doing board rework.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Mirror here. don't be surprised if all the images aren't on it yet...getting 900bytes/sec here folks.
local businesses lose no money, because they don't carry imports to begin with :p
wanker
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
First we had solid solder, cool. Then we had rosin-core solder for electronics, cooler. Then we had tabs of solder that could be melted with a lighter, lame. Now we have a toaster that can be used to solder, which is theoreticaly cool but realistically lame.
Wouldn't this paste have a higher resistance than the solder we know and love? Couln't a soldering iron be used to heat it with greater efficiency? Does it have any use outside of SMD?
Maybe I'm just weird, but I won't part with my soldering iron any time soon. SMD may be cool, but it doesn't have the "cobbled togethor" look of a traditionally etched and soldered circuit.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Prehaps its time to bring back that old favourite Acts of Gord who really is a small game shop owner
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
I'm thinking that's what makes this work.
I wonder if this could be adapted for mass production? Not having to individually solder pins would have to speed things up. The error rate is a little high for production, but I'm sure it could be improved with a little engineering.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Isn't this the same place we read about the person who put his PDA in the oven to dry it?
Solder melts at around 350 degrees, the maximum storage temperature for ICs is around 140 degrees F, and 200 for mil spec chips. Heating the whole board and components to 350 for long enough for the solder to melt will destroy the chips.
Jason
ProfQuotes
So does this mean that if I use this process for my MB and put a notoriously hot AMD chip in it, it'll re-melt the paste?
"No, seriously guys, my computer is bleeding to death."
-Valiss
Oh, yes, like anybody is under the illusion that the vast majority, or even a sizable minority, of modchips are used solely to play games written in languages that most American consumers don't even understand.
--sdem
here and here
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I wonder if he's trying to solder with his server now...
Karma. Moderation. Is my
thats all i use them for...i have to have some way to actively use my japanese otherwise i never seem to fit in the time to learn it
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Well, soldering in hovens is by no means an unconventional way. Nowdays components are in BGA packages (ball grid arrays), which are matrices of solder balls under the package (see image). Those baybies can be soldered ONLY in an hoven. Same goes to the chipset of the motherboard of the computer you're using right now, unless it's a rather old one. So those guys apply the indutry standard to an amateur project. You can note that the things they solder could also be soldered with a soldering iron. Soldering a BGA that way can be more problematic, but that would kick ass! (usually BGA comes with multi-layer printed circuit board (PCB), so you wouldn't be able to go outside the professional circuit anyway).
We returned to the kitchen to find the heating element was an unwholesome shade of orange, and the chips were already black.
An oven mit, a concrete floor, and half a box of baking soda later, the flames were extenguished.
Maybe where you live. But in many parts of the country I have found game shops which sell imports. They also may sell mod eq, however.
http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:okXVGJjYnsAC: www.seattlerobotics.org/encoder/200006/oven_art.ht m+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
i know this is redundant but even the cache was slow to load, so here it is
Stop hanging out with pirates so you can appreciate the beauty of imports. Lots of games never make it over to the states, leaving little recourse but to import. One certainly doesn't need a translation for any Bemani game, or Fighting games, or even Sims for the most part. Plus there are tons of sites out on the web that provide translations for the more difficult parts.
I think you've allowed yourself to get caught up in the scene too much to even consider what people are doing with their stuff. I mean, why bother pirating a game when you can have a real copy in minutes with a trip down to your local store? And the real copy doesn't require any funky chips or discs to get working.
IMHO, Nintendo got this right with the GBA. The GBA has no region lock out, so there is basically no modchip industry for it. Granted there are still mods (The Afterburner is a nice kit that works great), but none of the "defeat lockout" variety. I don't know anybody who pirates GBA games (although I'm not really part of the Warez scene either).
I read the internet for the articles.
Why burn ants when you can put that magnifying glass to good use soldering circuits together in the summer sun? ;-)
Seriously though, wouldn't it be cool if someone modified a laser-pen (or appropriately set up fibre-optic light source) to serve as a soldering iron?
No more fumbling with hot-metal iron pens. Shutter the light and it's cold!
--The more you know, the less you know.
Since installing the "accessory", I've bought maybe five or six import games from my local import game store. This import game store charges an arm and a leg for those rare games.
If not for my "accessory", I would be patronizing Software Etc. and similar chains.
I don't want to play Quake 2 on my Dreamcast; I want to play Guilty Gear X, or Shenmue II, or Capcom vs. SNK 2. To do that, you need to be a criminal.
Instead of the traditional soldering iron, Kenneth Maxon has successfully used a toaster oven to solder surface mount parts.
We.., *I* can solder SMPs with a *blow drier*. Ergo, I rule.
Mom: Kids, dinner's ready! Kids: Oh boy mom! Whatcha got cookin in the oven? Mom: You're favorite... home made, roasted to perfection Intel chips (Pentiyumms?)
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
They can just put their site on slashdot, and let their overheated server sauter for them.
~ kjrose
Well, if my local video store would carry import games and DVD's **AND** Sony would allow me to play/view them without a mod chip, I wouldn't need one, would I?
Region codes don't make any sense if the product isn't even available in other regions... duh!
Just because all YOU could think of was pirated games, doesn't mean that's all they're good for.
Grow up, stop suckling off the party-line and digest your own FUD.
This reminds me of the possibly hypocriphal story about a chip maker that noticed the contamination rate on their chips seemed to spike once a week, usually on monday. It wasn't until an engineer stopped in on a weekend and discovered that the cleaning crew was using the oven they baked the silicon wafers in to cook pizza. The fact that they didn't discover this cause there were no engineers in on the weekend makes me think it might be made up, but repeat anything enough and it becomes true!
Now my girlfriend can finally cook me something I will like ...
... If I had a girlfriend! Thanks for reminding me how big of a nerd I am.
Lead sintered pop-tarts. (I hope this toster isn't used for food henceforth)
This was discuessed on piclist shortly after oven soldering came up. The conclusion was you would need a laser that costs many thousands of dollars to get the wattage necessary to solder with.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I have to confess I'm amazed to see someone use something as commonplace as a toaster oven to do the work of >$60,000 reflow ovens ;-) I'm an engineer in charge of a surface mount line, and there are a few interesting issues to consider when trying such techniques, the biggest of which is "ramp and soak" which in a nutshell is how hot a component gets over a given amount of time. When soldering SMT components, it is imperative that a component recieves no more than 2 degrees C (about 3 degrees F) a second ramp-up in temperature. This is to prevent thermal shock and damage to the components. It is OK for a component to be exposed to soldering temperatures, ideally for as little as possible; a few seconds. When you solder a component in an oven the way this article describes, you run a risk of damaging sensitive components. Passive components like SMT resistors, coils, and simple IC's like logic gates generally take the punishment a lot better than film capacitors, PROM's, etc. Of course, just for foolin' around in the garage, the toaster oven method should be ok, likely you'll not fry the component if you don't leave it in there longer than you have to.
;-)
SMT reflow ovens, essentially, are identical to the ovens used in Pizza Hut where they stick a pizza in one end and it is taken through heating zones via a conveyor and pops out the other side done. In SMT reflow, the zones are controlled in such a manner that the holy 2 degrees C rule is never broken. (I used to joke that on the day I get fired, I was going to stick a frozen pizza in our reflow oven just to see what'd happen.)
My method of soldering IC's to a board is simple and IPC approved: Place the IC on the pads; center it up as well as you can. Using a regular soldering iron, "tack" two opposing corners of the IC to the lands with conventional solder. Don't worry about bridging. Then, apply a small amount of liquid solder flux to one side of the IC, bathing the legs. Then, apply a small bead of solder to the end of you iron and GENTLY wipe this bead across all the legs, from pin one to pin whatever. (Yes, it's counter-intuitative,) and you'll see as if by magic that you'll get very few solder bridges. Apply more flux if required. Clean tip of iron completely of solder, and just touch it to solder bridges. The excess solder will "sweat" to the iron. Clean iron tip again and repeat. When done, clean flux with laquer thinner or similar substance. (If you use no-clean flux, you could just be gross and leave it there if you wished, removing excess with a paper towel.) I find that a simple toothbrush dipped in thinner does wonders.
Or, you can stick stuff in your wife's toaster and take chances that way
Take care now ~!
I've soldered toast to mine multiple times.
debunkmyth()
{
flamesuiton = true;
Yes, nobody would ever use a mod chip for anything but piracy. The big homebrew ps2 scene is just a myth, right?
I can't beleive I'm feeding an obvious troll here, but some of us are big into application development for the ps2 and that requires a mod chip. God forbid anyone program for a peice of hardware the own.
}
"The Wright brothers were the first to fly with a heavier-than-air machine, but boy did they have a lousy plane"
Slashdotted after 1 post? Oh, my! I guess they're serving the site off a toaster, too. ;)
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
http://www.johnytech.com/sdm/oven_art.html
I Encrypt My IM's
They can just melt the solder with the heat coming off their webserver...
I'm too lazy to think of anything to put here.
Do you happen to have a pointer to the archives of that discussion handy? I'm interested in reading them.
:-)
Looking at the R500 Solder Paste specs the peak temperature shown is 225C (437F). Paper burns at 233C (451F) and a magnifying glass can burn paper easily on a sunny day, so I would at least expect the magnifying glass approach to work.
--The more you know, the less you know.
Back in the day when I was cutting my teeth at a contract manufacturer, we used a toaster oven, an I/O card and an 8086 to do reflow soldering. That was back when the majority of components were still had leads and we only did limited runs of SMT parts. We couldn't afford a real reflow oven for a while. We used and abused that oven for years then actually SOLD the thing.
A reflow oven is just a fancy pizza oven. It has a conveyor belt and different zones so you can controll the time/temperature profile of the board as the solder starts to flow (tuning this is an art). I went to Nepcon one year (a electronics manufacturing trade show) and a company had some blonde eye candy making chocolate chip cookies in their top of the line reflow oven. It was obviously virgin equipment...the oven that is.
Some of you mentioned using light to solder...this is quite common now. White light actually works better than lasers believe it or not. The broad band spectral content transfers more energy to the solder.
the flux. it's all in the flux.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
and you couldn't even write your own article summary. tsk, tsk.
As other posters have indicated, reflowing solder paste in a toaster oven has been done for years and simulates the standard process for SMT assembly.
Using Solder Paste, you can use a hot air gun to place components on a PCB as well. A woman I know at work (Celestica) made a video demonstrating the SMT solder process using a hot air gun - it came out quite nicely and her joke on customers was saying that she followed the board through the oven (it was vapor phase at the time). Many customers were impressed with her tolerance to extreme heat.
As somebody noted, most components will stop working at 140C and in the oven they will go over 200C - they will survive, but the PCB should not be powered up until the PCB has cooled to room temperature.
If you're going to try this at home, a few comments:
1. Solder paste will only stay reliably sticky for 30 minutes. Make sure that you have your components ready and the oven at the primary temperature before you break the seals on the syringe and start applying paste. Make sure that you don't have more components than you can place in 20 minutes.
2. Solder "paste" is made up of finely ground solder held together by flux. Both the solder and the flux are poisenous and during the solder process you will see a build up of flux on the inside of the oven. Along with this, the solder may form "balls" that can be thrown off the PCB. An oven used for SMT experiments cannot be used for food preparation afterwards.
3. Solder paste must be capped and refridgerated when not in use. If you are storing it in a fridge where food is stored, make sure that it is in something like a tupperwear container and well marked (especially if children are around). It looks like pate or liverwurst, but will sit in your stomach like a ball of lead (sorry, couldn't resist).
4. The PCB coming out of the oven is very hot and will take several minutes to cool down. I've heard of a number of people that have built SMT boards in a toaster oven, only to forget oven mitts and tongs to handle the hot PCBs and ended up dropping the PCB on the floor and burning themselves. One genius I heard about was sitting down when he pulled the board out of the oven without any mitts or tongs... Make sure you have something like a barbeque grill ready for the PCB to sit on when it comes out of the over.
5. The PCB should be as dry as possible. Before putting on paste/components, you might want to put it into the over for a day or so at the lowest setting to try and bake out any water that has gotten trapped in it. Let the PCB cool before applying paste.
6. The PCB pads should be "HASL" ("Hot Air Solder Leveled") for best results (do not try this on bare copper and you may have to experiment with gold finishes).
7. I would suggest using parts with leads on 0.050" (50 mil) centers, 0805 chip components and SOT-23 transistor and diodes. Anything smaller will make applying the solder very difficult. The article indicates the author used smaller spacing components, but not how many and how the PCB was laid out.
8. Do not use surface mount connectors. Unless you are very comfortable with doing your own soldering, you will find that it is difficult to get a uniformly strong joint on every pin.
9. If you are designing your own PCB, you can use Protel's "EasyTrax", which is an MS-DOS Command Line program that can be downloaded for free from a variety of sources (you should be able to find where on Google). I have added IPC standard pad layouts for the library components.
I've done it a couple of times with an old toaster oven and it works surprisingly well. Just make sure you plan out what you are going to do and if there are any terms that I have used above that you are unfamilia with, make sure that you investigate them before trying it out on your own.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
and port linux to it. After all a Siplace 80f series can be gotten cheap...Except no hardware or software support:P [man, that RMS dude was right!]
Yes it would be cool to get watts worth of heat from a milliwatt source.
No more fumbling with hot-metal iron pens. Shutter the light and it's cold!
That's true! When your eyes quit steaming, you'll quickly tire of soldering things by sense of touch and smell.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
How long till someone thinks, "Hey, it took 30 mins in the toaster oven. I can to it in 3 mins in my microwave!"
When was the last time that CowboyNeal actually posted 4 stories in a row? Is everyone else out drinking already?
I tell you, the world's gone mad.
You've got two things going for you when you burn paper with a magnifying glass that you don't have while heating a chip lead. Paper combusts spontaniously, and paper is a poor conductor of heat compared to copper, tin, and lead. This means that you can heat a tiny spot on a piece of paper to over 400F more easily than a spot of copper because the energy you're putting into the paper isn't being carried away so fast, and that you only have to set a tiny spot of paper on fire for the whole sheet to burn. My guess would be that your magnifying glass wouldn't be able to heat a chip lead up that much because the heat would get carried elsewhere almost as quickly as you were putting it in, and even if it didn't, you'd have to pump a lot more heat into the chip lead since it's got to be completely heated to get the job done instead of having just a tiny spot heated.
unfortunately, there ain't no hand reworking them. you gotta get the right tools.
I was pretty disappointed. There were tons of solder bridges (where the solder connects two pins together), some pins that didn't stick reliably, etc. I wound up spending as much effor cleaning up as I would have doing it by hand in the first place. If I was going to try it again, I might make a solder mask to apply the paste only on the pads, instead of running a thin line across the pads as they recommended.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Years ago I used a Wagner heat gun to unsolder unneeded 40 pin dips from circuit boards. I was already using the gun to remove the "protective" epoxy so it was convienient. I've also used a shrink wrap gun (much milder than the Wagner) to reflow solder on dimms that had cold solder joints.
Deuteronomy 13:06-9
Oh yeah and all the playstations, nintendos and segas that put arcades out of business is any better. How dare them big corporate thieves steal from the arcade owners.
I miss my T-Mek game.
Life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. -FB
Interesting discussion happening here, thanks.
So trying to heat it directly wouldn't work because heat gets sucked into the lead too quickly...
Sounds like you would have to use a hybrid approach. Heat the tip of something non-heat-conducting and touch that tip to the lead you're soldering. You would probably have to do this repetitively, in a pulsed manner - the tip acts as a small heat capacitor (for lack of a better word) that you're heating and cooling.
Hmmm... I wonder if one could design a heat pump like a charge/voltage pump.?. Think Taser mechanism with a diode/capacitor chain, only using optically-generated heat and TiNi alloy mechanical switching.
--The more you know, the less you know.
...that you're comparing legitimate competition with outright theft? Last I checked, downloading a "backup" and burning it on CD to play in your chipped PS was still stealing.
--sdem
You can get GBA Flash cards which can store text, images and games. There is even some kind of emulator to play old NES game ROMS on it. People use those to pirate GBA games a lot.
I've heard of some flash cards being seized by customs via some DMCA clause invoked by Nintendo and the person who ordered the card being out their money.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
It would be nice if the author (or submitter) could supply the slashdot community with the Digikey Part numbers?
If it was just the solder, it would be one thing. But the page mentions tips, etc needed.
Thanks
i have to have some way to actively use my japanese
If you want to do this without installing a mod chip, then import a Japanese PS1 to play your PS1 games.
Will I retire or break 10K?
putting your local video game stores out of business, you thief.
Your assumption, that mod chips are useful only for playing infringing copies of proprietary game software, is not valid. Mod chips and similar console accessories are useful for developing homebrew software; when marketed solely for that purpose, they do not violate the DMCA. The shops that have busted for selling mod chips either 1) advertised them as useful for playing "backups" or 2) did not bundle the mod chips with a copy of a development tool such as GCC.
Will I retire or break 10K?
i hope that toasters used in this manner get retired from toasting food products.
but some of us are big into application development for the ps2 and that requires a mod chip.
It requires either an independently produced mod chip, or the official PS2 mod chip produced by Sony.
Will I retire or break 10K?
while i could do this, there isnt much point when i can just run a mod chip. I already have a dozen consoles hooked to my TV...the last thing i have is space for more than i have to have
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
also works well for reflow of components. For rework purposes, use aluminium muffler tape to screen off the rest of the area around the component you are heating up. My recipe to remove a large chip: 1 minute at 2 inches to preheat 1 minute at 1/2 inch to reflow Flip chip off with an ice pick
Good, leave the ants alone. [grin] :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Perhaps...
Specs sheet sez "leaves bright/shiny solder joints after reflow", which begs the question how does the powder refract/absorb light before reflow? Powders tend to exhibit different optic properties from their more macroscopic solid equivalents.
In any case, it could serve as a simple automated trigger mechanism. Stop applying heat/light when it "gets shiny"...
--The more you know, the less you know.
THAT SAID, WHAT IS IT ABOUT SOLDERING THAT STRIKES FEAR INTO PEOPLE???
I wish I'd thought of this back when I had to solder one of those *ahem* aftermarket accessories to my playstation, since the whole process looks easier than trying to hold a soldering iron steady.
This technique isn't a substitute for learning to use a soldering iron. It's just not. "Maybe if I do this complicated, tricky thing with a toaster oven, I won't have to use (shudder) a soldering iron!!!"
Just to get things straight here, a few things I've had to explain to people in the last year or so:
Reflow with a toaster oven will not substitute for learning to solder.
Conductive epoxy will not substitute for learning to solder. (it's for making connections to things you can't solder, and is more difficult to work with than solder)
"Solderless breadboards" will not substitute for learning to solder.
Buying lots of alligator clip jumpers is no substitute for learning to solder, either.
Conductive pens will not substitute for making circuit boards
Am I leaving anything out?
Heh. The point I was getting at with this train of thought was that you wouldn't have to heat a huge stick of metal. You could make it AA-battery powered instead of wall-powered, and it wouldn't have to contain volatile fuels like butane to make it portable.
;-)
When you're done with it you wouldn't have to wait long for it to cool down before putting it back in a tool-kit or pocket.
Ah well, it was just an idea. Do with it what you wish; it's in the public domain now.
--The more you know, the less you know.
I did, but they didn't like mine i guess :)
--buddy
Just in case someone wants to do it the hand-soldered way:
SMT assembly techniques
I have a distribution node running at http://pcp03249578pcs.wanarb01.mi.comcast.net:8891 /S9C7yhFAWLw/ for the next 24 hours or 100 downloads, whichever comes first.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
...they've also figured out a way to make toast with a soldering iron.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
A SMT workstation would be sweet to have, but the $800+ price tag puts it a bit out of the reach of the average hobbiest.
It's been a while since I looked at the prices, but since the stations are sold primarily to businesses with deep pockets, I can't imagine that they are much cheaper today.
Pinball, arcade video, tech and more: www.micsaund.com
Yeah but where's the CHALLENGE? That just takes all the fun out of garage tinkering, trying to solder components onto perfboards without burning up a) the components and b) your fingers.
SMD may be the future, but it's for weenies...
FWIW, I have a thin 8 1/2 x 11" fresnel that can easily melt a lump of regular solder (then turn it into a wierd yellowish powdery-crystally thing)
iirc, you can also use it to peel traces off of circuit boards. (it also melts sand, ashes, chars wood instantly...)
We used to melt blobs (BIG blobs) of solder using a fresnel lens a guy here had bought from a homeware shop. The lens was marketed as "making a small TV look like a big TV" or somesuch (with no mention at all of the pixelation and distortion that made viewing it unbearable). We could focus the size of the lens (about 20" square), down to much less than 1".
1 sqm of sunlight here in the subtropics is more than 1000W, so we were focussing maybe 300W into an area less then 1 square inch. Needless to say, it was easily hot enough to melt the solder. It was very uncontrolled, though.
...I've put up a mirror (with optimized images) here.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
That is what I want one for. Unfortunately, I don't really want to risk destroying my PS2 for a handful of games, and none of the solderless ones seem to work for imports (unless you crack the region coding and burn a copy).
Y'know, I have to agree.
20 years ago when I did a lot more hardware hacking then I do now, homebrew was *the only way* to get a lot of equipment that was either too expensive or simply unavailable. I still remember when I built my first IBM clone machine out of specs and parts bought from all over via mail order.
It was a fantastic way to learn the internals of the machines and hone one's hardware skills.
Nowadays homebrew is all too often considered "patent infringement" or "piracy" and discouraged. Like you said, god forbid that someone *buys hardware* and modifies it for *their own use*.
Fucking bastards. This really pisses me off. Especially when it limits access to hardware (like programmable (x)rom controllers) that has many, many legit uses but is difficult to get because of a few illegit (like sat TV).
"chilling effect" indeed...
sigh
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
RF inductive heated soldering irons like Metcal's use much lower frequencies than microwaves, somewhere in the range of 10-15 Mhz IIRC.
But yeah, they're damned useful, and affordably available on ebay.
Don't forget the episode where Homer tried to repair the toaster and winds up turning it into a time machine.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
Take e.g. CO2 lasers. They are cheap, can relatively easy be made at home (http://www.repairfaq.org/sam/lasersam.htm) and at the wavelength of about 10um, nearly nothing is that reflective.
This technique is only really suitable for special case surface mount soldering.
If you're not using surface mount components (like mod chips) you're going to have to use a soldering iron anyway.
The key to making any iron work easy (even surface mount!) is to use plenty of flux.
Get a seperate container of just flux and don't be afraid to use it. It makes a WORLD of difference.
Rats would be more funny if they could fart.
pay twice for the same console?
why? that's just stupid.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
I was using a hot air gun to solder and unsolder surface-mount components back in the early 1980's probably before most slashdotters were born.
It really doesn't matter what the source is: you still have to put X joules of heat into the metal to raise its temperature Y degrees. I doubt you could get enough energy out of a couple of AA cells to do much more than a solder joint or two.
Yeah, but just try debugging or modding SMD stuff. It's practically impossible.
I personally miss the the gradual disappearing of through-hole work, because I could debug it and fix/mod it. Can't do anything interesting with SMD.
I'm glad I wasn't convinced of that before I tried my first hobby SMD design project. SMD boards are great -- you can hand-solder chips with 0.65mm lead pitch without too much grief, and unlike most garden-variety through-hole PCBs, you have access to every component and connection from the top of the board. For RF work, SMD combines the convenience and tweakability of dead-bug construction with the professionalism and neatness of PCBs.
It probably won't be too long before many types of chips and discrete components are available only in SMD. The more interesting RF chips are already unavailable in DIP packages. This is one of those generational changes, like the transition from vacuum tubes to solid-state technology, that you'll just have to deal with if you want to stay current in the hobby.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Buy your soildering iron toaster ovens at good will! Not only does the money go to helping the poor, but you are helping keep usable appliances out of our landfills! Besides, with all the nasty stuff in the water based soldier, i doubt you'd want to cook with it afterwards. If you mod me up, mod me as informative, not funny; I'm being serious here, help out your local charity.
moox. for a new generation.
Back in the '60s (or maybe the early '70s) I saw a board for a high-end processor that used a related trick. (I think it was by Seymour Cray when he was still working for Control Data.)
The board had some hysterical number of layers (for the time), like in the 30s or 40s. And it was literally paved with 14- and/or 16-pin DIPs. On BOTH sides.
Now this was a problem, because DIPs have feet that go through holes and are mormally soldered on the OPPOSITE side of the board. To get maximum density the DIPs had to be laid out so that the pins of the DIPs on ONE side come up under the middle of the DIPs on the OTHER side. If you stuff one side you can get to the legs of the DIPs to solder them. But how do you solder down the legs of the dips from the other side? (It doesn't help to stuff 'em both at the same time, because then you can't get to EITHER side.)
The solution was to start by soldering down the first side's worth of DIPs with ordinary-temperature solder, as usual. Then they put little donuts of low-temperature solder with flux paste around each leg of each second-side DIP, insert them, and heat the whole assembly to a temperature that would melt the low-temp but not the high-temp solder.
Of course you had to bring all the legs to be soldered and the through-holes up to soldering temperature and back down in a few seconds. Otherwise you'd cook the chips and/or destroy the multilayer board (wich was DREADFULLY expensive). That's a very short time to heat and cool the parts to a very carefully controlled temperature. Too high and you unsolder the first layer of chips, too low and you get bad joints among the tens of thousands of chip legs.
So they dunked 'em in hot vegetable oil, with a carefully controlled temperature and dunk duration.
Think "deep fryer".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
(I think it was by Seymour Cray when he was still working for Control Data.)
Now that I think about it, if it was Cray and integrated circuits, it would have been AFTER he left Control Data. He first used integrated circuits in the Cray I.
He used discrete components before that, because in those days the speed advantage of discrete transistors and lower-resistance wiring sped up the logic more than the wider spacing of the parts slowed it down, so he could make faster machines that way. The crossover point was reached for TTL about the time he started his own company.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
you work sONY for?
De sig boss de sig
(Aside: a Joule is a Newton-meter.) What you're saying would be true for a regular soldering iron where you're wasting energy heating several grams of metal (and keeping it hot all the time) when the business end is only a few mm^2 surface area. We're going to have to wait for compact fuel cell technology to come out before that becomes practical.
What I am suggesting is an active delivery mechanism, so the heating only needs to happen on a few milligrams of heatable metal or other contact material. You're reducing the total volume of metal being heated so you don't need as much energy to get it to the same temperature.
I agree that a regular AA cell probably wouldn't be able to deliver the deep-discharge currents you would need to heat things up in a reasonable amount of time. You would have to use something like a supercapacitor to buffer the charge-discharge cycles. For manual soldering work, you only need to deliver heat to the point of contact for a short period of time relative to total on-time.
More experimentation is needed. No numbers were harmed in this qualitative thought process, just orders of magnitude.
--The more you know, the less you know.
This technique is actually being promoted by a great hobby PCB manufacturer. The company pcbexpress (http://www.pcbexpress.com/stencils/index.php) will make a stencil for your custom board. Then you use a squegee to apply the solder paste to all the pads, palce the parts, and then bake! Wha La! Easy SMD soldering. The only problem is if you have parts on both sides, when you back one side, the parts will fall off the other :( It's quite hard cleaning up all those tiny capacitors off the bottom of your toaster over.
Probably written above, but is this a new use for a couple OC'ed Athlons?
Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
did it one time with a cast iron skillet after about 15 minutes sitting on low heat. Got the idea from a Circuit Cellar Ink coulmn several years ago.
...before someone works out how to solder using an iron.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
See, this is why I have excellent karma and get modded up constantly, while you poor karma and have to resort to posting at 0.
piclist.com, then go to the archives. You have to register to get access though. Look for some messages about hot air soldering and follow the long thread. It's an interesting read in any case.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
500 Watts, wow! That would be a hell of a diode. You can get CO2 lasers like that now, but they will fry your eyes out and you can't put them in your pocket. Considering a 25 watt model can damage your eyes, I'd be afraid of what a 500W model can do.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Isn't this what they use to circumvent security in a jiffy and get into a room? WOW! Talk about security technology in the future, we have it right now.
Well that it was done in 2003, is no real cool thing. However, when I worked for Olivetti in the 80's (about 1985-1987), we used a toaster oven to reflow solder paste to mount capacitors, resistors transistors and IC's. We designed a "Pick and Place" tool to first, paste all of the pads in which we were going to mount a device. Then we placed all of the componets in there proper place. then off to a preheated toaster oven. After a few moments, the solder reflowed. Removed the pcb and let it cool down. Then we could solder all of the normal IC's to the board. This was R&D, not production, but zero failures.
Do you plan on using that oven for food later?
How about having kids with only two eyes?
Very good point that some may have overlooked.
DO NOT USE THE TOASTER OVER FOR FOOD COOKING AFTER MELTING LEAD INSIDE IT
Lead fumes from a previous soldering session can vaporize off the oven walls, stick to the food (and all dishware), and poison you slowly - Lead poisoning is NOT fun.
GOOGLE [ Lead Poisoning ]
Thank you for bringing this up.
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.
I wouldn't trust a toaster oven to have a reliable heat setting. If the temperature isn't supposed to go over a set level, then you better have a damn good oven.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
First time I had seen this technique used was in 1994 when I was working for a medium sized subcontract assembly shop in Markham, Ontario.
The SMT pick and place machine was already installed and running. The owner wanted to start up a small run of a few 10s of boards before I was able to commision the Second hand SMT reflow oven he had purchased.
I decided that I wouldn't use the toaster oven to warm up my lunch after that.
The reflow oven's control system was a PC running windows 3.1. One could play minesweeper or solitaire while waiting for the boards to come out the other end when fine tuning a profile.