Hi welcome to the Eev blog an Electronics engineering video blog of interest to anyone involved in electronics design. I'm your host Dave Jones Hi It's product review time again and I haven't done one of these before, but it's an essential bit of kit for practically every electronics lab these days. It's the hot air rework station, and in particular it's the Uh A10 Model 858d plus super duper cheap. Let's check it out and here it is.

It's a very basic unit, but it's pretty much all you need for a hot air rear workk station. And the great thing about this is that it's ridiculously cheap. I Got this for 82 Australian Delivered to my door from China or Hong Kong or wherever it was straight off eBay Now I Can't find this particular model the 858d on the A10 website. It seems to be a more modern version of what they're selling.

They sell like the Hoo ripoff. they. they look very much like the Heo Uh units, but this one is a new style. It's got a digital LED readout.

It's got uh, airflow adjustment and temperature setting. That's all you need. so it's probably the cheapest hot air rework station on the market probably by far. If you go, buy a quality brand like a Hoo one cost you an arm and a leg, but one of these things will it do the job well? For $82 bucks, let's find out.

so what exactly is a hot air rework station? Well, it's nothing fancy. It's basically a heater that blows hot air. That's it. It's just like a, you know, a $10 hot air gun you can buy from the hardware store, but a little bit more advanced cuz it allows you to dial up the specific temperature and the air flow rate.

and stuff like that and what it's good for these days is SMD stuff. So if you're designing like little boards like this, or you're reworking them, anything to do with SMD components, which is pretty much most designs these days. Even hobbyists are using sometimes almost exclusively SD parts. And really, if you don't have one of these, you're really not in the game.

So it's a very essential bit of kit for. um, not only SMD rework, it allows you to take components off the board real easy. That's one of the key features. Uh, instead of butchering it with a soldering iron if you've got like a S So package IC Sure, you can get around there with your side Cutters and you can cut off the legs and do all all that sort of stuff, but it's pretty nasty.

Get out one of these babies and boom. Within a couple of seconds, the chip is off. Not to mention that, uh, BGA chips like that one. for example, if you want to get that off, you can't do it with a conventional soldering iron.

Forget it, it's just not possible. So pretty much, um, these things are essential for not for actually getting parts off the board, but they're also pretty darn handy for if you're assembling SMD boards. A lot of people assemble their own SMD boards. You can do it with a traditional soldering iron of course and very fine solder and you can solder each joint.

but a lot of people will use solder paste dab that on the joint I have to do another whole video on that one I think but there's videos out there if you want to check them out. but you dab some solder paste on and then you place the component and then you just run along with the hot air. It melts the solder and it or it. Reflow the solder.

it's called Reflow soldering and Bob's your uncle. Your board's assembled easy and just being a general purpose hot air gun. it's great for like heat shrink uh, on wires and stuff like that too. Pretty versatile bit of gear now.

I've never actually had one of these in the Eev blog lab before because I've always relied on work having pretty Advanced SMD gears so I've never really needed it here. If I want to rework a board, eh, just take it to work and do it to lunchtime. No problems with at all. But uh, because I'm working from the lab these days I thought I' just search I just searched eBay got the cheapest one I could I could get it.

looked pretty good for 80 bucks I figured you couldn't go wrong so let's crack it open see what's inside and there we go. There's not much uh in it at all. as you can see, there's just a small transformer in there to power the electronics itself that wouldn't actually power the heater. There's the IC connector right up the back nicely.

I Don't know if you can see in there, but they have put silicon sealant around that IC connector because they have been known to actually, um, pop out if you pull the plug out hard enough. so that's a nice little touch. And apart from that, here's the front panel board. Let's take a look at that in detail.

and there's the controller in it. It's a HT 46 R23 That's a Holte brand 8 bit, uh, micro controller. Nothing fancy. It's just a 8 bit micro with some Adcs and and other stuff.

That's pretty much all you expect in this sort of thing. Um, that's really all you need. It's a single Sider board. They've really lowered the cost on this one.

This is how they've uh, got the price down to that incredible level there. but um, it's It's not bad at all really. Um, for the price you can't uh, you can't complain. There's that silicon.

again. They've dobbed the Silicon around the uh cable uh, clamp there and the main switch on the front which goes back to the um, the main Transformer and not a problem. It's just I don't know it's it's not bad. It's pretty much what I expected.

There's certainly nothing wrong with it. and interestingly, there's a test jumper there. They've got a little, uh, a little header connector there for um, some sort of test I might have to, uh, whack a jumper on that and see what it does. but uh, as you can see, it's um, all basically uh Goes is actually connected um straight through to the Um through to the front panel.

There's no wiring. On the bottom, you can see the Um seven segment displays for the LED there are solded directly on the back. The buttons there are on that's the uh cow pot. There's a hole in the front for for adjusting the calibration on this thing um, which you could tweak yourself if you wanted to.

And there's the control pot uh as well. right in there, which goes through to the knob on the front panel. Pretty basic and it's not a bad design at all. And judging by the date code there, uh, 20110 410, There you go.

It's um, a fairly recent model and it's time to take the hand piece apart. Now there's only two screws here by the looks of it. and uh, this bit here looks like it just screws off like that. I like it.

and uh, we'll take those two screws out and see what's inside. Oh taada, There it is. There you go and that's pretty much exactly what I expected. Uh, there's a centrifugal uh fan here, which is also called a squirrel cage fan or a blower fan something like that.

it uh, it. it takes in the air through here which comes through the Uh case through the vent holes. In the case, you'll note that the other side actually has fake vent holes and they're just there to match it visually. but they don't have anything cuz there is no intake on the other side of the fan.

now. um, that's a 24v. There we go. It's a 24 vol.1 amp uh blower fan and as you can expect, the intake is here and it just comes out and this here is actually a rubber.

uh. Outlet it has its own little holder there to actually prevent. uh, the to prevent the air that comes out from back flowing into the design like that. I Guess that's the whole idea of it.

Um, and it just blows through and there's the heater element goes down in there I won't take that apart any further I don't think I don't really want to damage and I don't care. there's just a heater element in there with a temperature sensor and uh, that's uh, pretty much it really. But uh, this down here is a magnetic read switch because the unit itself has a fancy feature which we'll uh, see later that when you place this in the Um, when you place it onto the holder like that, it actually switches off the read switch actually Uh, engages like that and it switches it off. Nice little um, safety and convenience feature I Really like it.

so that's how they've implemented that. And underneath here is a tiny little board, doesn't It's really just a interface board, but it's actually labeled. It's quite nice. There's there's the uh, it's got labels for the heater, for the fan, for the sent.

uh, there's ground and there's a well u1b I'm not sure what that is, but uh yeah, it's just a little interface connector board. I'm sure if I take that out, there's no circuitry on the back there. Now this is rather interesting. Look at the fan here and it's had a huge big chunk.

almost. I thought well, you know, maybe there was. You know, somebody goofed something during manufacturer or it's just something weird. but it's got a matching one on the other side here.

I Don't know why have they ground that down to make it fit in? I Don't think so, cuz I think it, you know it would have fitted anyway. Maybe it maybe they did have some sort of ear on there or something like that. I'm I'm not too sure, but there's a reason why they've actually chopped out those or ground out those two bits. Weird.

Now let's check out the unit in a bit more detail, shall we? It's a nice funky looking modern design I Like it. It's really lightweight. There's no big bulky, uh, heavy Transformer in there. so it's all electronic really.

and uh, it's a nice small footprint sitting on your bench I Love it. It doesn't take up much room at all, and of course it's got a nice little stand on the side which is absolutely essential because when you've when you're done working with this thing, you just whack it back on there and you know you're not going to burn anything on your desk unless you have it sitting next to your scope like that. and uh, well, that would be a bad idea, but generally it's pretty darn good. I Like it.

Um, really simple uh. user interface: This controls the uh fan speed. It's just air. um 1 through to 8 I don't know what that actually means in terms of uh flow rate, but it's got, uh, the ability to adjust your temperature, up and down, on off and that's all you need.

And on the back here, just a standard IC input connector. but beware, if you're buying this, it's this is a 220 volt model only, so it will not do. It's not a universal um input. Supply So just be very careful when you're ordering these on.

eBay Make sure you order the right one. now. These hot air rework stations come in two types. Uh, the first type is the one that has the fan inside the main unit at itself and it would generally have two cords coming out or a combined one.

One is for the power to drive the heater inside the element uh, inside the Uh hand piece itself, but it will have an air output which will also connect up to here, but this one doesn't. It actually has the Uh, the fan and the air intake built into the handle. Now, um, there's pros and cons. uh, both ways.

Really, this is a simpler design I Think just from a design uh, point of view, but it could be louder because the fan is inside the unit itself. but this is a incredibly lightweight unit. It's not heavy at all. I Like an ergonomically ergonomically, mind you, it is actually quite nice.

I Like it and the holder is as well. This can actually be mounted on the other side. It's got the screws over here, so left or right-handed or left or right side of the bench, so that's really quite handy. Let's switch it on and give it a go, shall we? As you can see, it switches on and it instantly goes into SLP modal sleep mode because of the sensor I told you about in the handle which sits in here.

There's two magnets either side of that and if we lift it off Bingo it starts. It starts going there. you go 118 135 so all you do is you set your temperature like that. Let's see how low it goes It goes down to 100 is its lowest Uh temp which is great for heat shrink cuz uh, a typical heat shrink might be rated at say, 125.

so it's just nice to be able to go down to that low. Obviously it's got to take some time to get back down there because it, uh, jumped up to the higher amount. Let's see if it keeps the temp temperature when we actually switch the unit off. I've set it to 105 there like that and let's switch it off and switch it back on and has it.

Yes, it has 105. It kept that temperature. Likewise, if we do 110, let's try that again and switch it back on Bingo 110. It keeps it nice.

There's one other thing with these. uh, the fan in the handle is how loud they are because you typically you will have this much closer to you than if your bench unit is sitting like halfway across the bench because as you know, sound, uh, drops with a square of the distance. So um, really, it's sound is important. but as you can hear it well I don't know it's it's hard to get a relative indicator, but trust me, that is not very loud at all.

It's really quite nice I like it and that's at maximum fan volume by the way, way, if I fan, well fan flow rate if I turn it right down I can barely hear that at all and really, that is quite a low fan rate. So in terms of sound, not a problem at all. Certainly the Heo ones I'm used to at work are much much louder than this one. So I give that a big thumbs up.

And as for the manual, well don't write home about it. This is it. It's all in. Chinese There is no uh English language version at all, but um, it does have a couple of little uh specs here.

Let's take a look at it. the sound less than 40db. that would be my guess. uh, too.

It certainly wouldn't be any louder than that. Um, let's uh, the adjustment range is 100 to 450 uh C and the flow rate I presume that's a maximum of 120 L per minute and it's got a 700 W uh heating element in there. They have got two models here. They've got the A and the D+ uh I guess D is digital.

uh plus the only difference I can see is that well it says it's got LED here. but uh, there's some different characters there and it's got 1 uh Celsius there for the D version. so I guess the D version is the one to get I haven't actually seen the A so I don't know what the uh differences are. of course.

one of the big questions with these sort of things is they will eventually, uh, wear out and can you get spare parts for them? I Have no idea. Uh A10 Not exactly a top quality brand, but they're not a one hung low either. Uh, they do have an internal uh assembly drawing with what looks like maybe uh, a parts list I am not sure. um so maybe you can get different parts for it, but I wouldn't count on it.

But for 85 bucks? jeez, or $82 I got this for I'm not too concerned about that. One of the things I am going to test is the temperature accuracy or I'm going to try to anyway. I've got my fluke uh, thermocouple probe here and I got to be careful this, this only goes up to about 260 maximum. Um I I believe.

Anyway, but let's uh, see if we can see if the temperature matches I don't expect it to match precisely. So there you go if I steady that a bit and keep it consistently right in front of there I am getting uh, it. It's telling me it's around about 170, but you know, really? I'm not sure of the uh, exact distance or uh, you know how to measure uh, temperature air flow like that if there's a standard distance I don't know. Some people might know more than that, let me know, but it's not too bad.

Check it out at a at a usable say 1 in from from the device. something like that, which is a typical distance you might use it or closer than that, it seems pretty darn close to that 150. it's I Certainly wouldn't complain about that at all. So I'd say that's a pass.

The temperature regulation seems to work just fine and of course, one of the useful things of these hot air rework Uh stations is for doing heat shrink nicely. This is a typical heat shrink. It's rated at 125. See, let's give it a go.

I've set it to Uh 125 there and let's see. Wait, yeah, it should. That should shrink uh, nicely and and it does not A problem. you can uh, you know better than using your soldering IR or a match or something bodgy like that.

It's just nicer to use a nice controlled temperature. so that's a very useful feature of having this go down to 100. C I Like it. There's some heat shrink that actually uh, melts it a bit lower than 100.

I Think you might even be able to get 80 heat shrink or something like that, but that's just really handy so you don't damage the wires or anything else that you're actually, uh, heat shrinking. Beautiful. There is one thing to note when you put it back onto the Uh handle like this, it doesn't switch off instantly, presumably to actually protect it to allow time to cool down. But it's You can see it's actually uh dropping.

Now it's actually Switched Off the uh element? um in there, but it's still blowing the fan just to uh, keep that and you'll find that when you when it hits 100 C it will switch it off. So okay. I Know what you're all thinking: Does it actually remove components from the board? Well, let's try and remove this. BGA device in here.

It's a small microcontroller. let's try and get that off. Uh, we should have no chance in hell of doing that with a regular soldering iron. so let's give that a go.

Let's uh, sort of adjust this up to Safe Let's go to Ah I don't know. 410 whatever. let's go to 410. I've got my uh uh air turned up to let's let not turned it up to Max Let's turned it up to about six, shall we? And let's give that a go? Okay, here we go.

let's give it a go. I probably should be holding this. there's a couple of ways to actually do this. one is to hold it upside down so gravity will, uh make it pop off.

but I'll just go around. I've got a thin nozzle tip which we'll talk about in a sec, but let's just go around the chip like that and see if we can see if we can pop it off. There we go. it's coming.

t uh he Yeah, the problem is I haven't held my board but there it is. Bingo! Now with these things, you got to be careful because uh, they can. The board is still actually quite hot I can feel that whole board has heated up I can barely touch because it's got copper around the outside. but there you go it got that BGA off.

No problems. and if you wanted to get those pads, you would, just, uh, suck that off with some solder Wick to get the excess solder off the pads and then you can rework the device. It works quite well. Now let's try say a uh te- so package here.

let's let's try and suck. say this one here off. Okay, now because this is a little te- uh, it's it's hard to get say your uh, well, it's actually impossible to get your Cutters in there and trim each leg as you could do maybe do for say, an So package I've taken some SOS off in that way, but it's much nicer to, uh, suck it off with the hot air gun. So let's give that a go.

let's see if we can, uh, suck out that T- chip. You go there it goes. Not a problem at all, too easy. and uh, the chip can we could.

We could actually reuse that chip if we wanted to because it's still intact. There's no problem there at all. And if you want to clean up those pads, as I said, just use some solder. Wick Not a problem, but you can suck uh, most components off like that without doing any major damage to your board.

Now the Uh temperature is quite important. I used Um, you know over 400 there that you know it depends on the quality of the board. This is a very high quality, high temperature um Fr4, uh board and so so it is actually designed to do uh, quite high temperatures, but you may want to watch The Temper the Uh temperature and the air flow rate. there's a bit of Art in that and there we go.

Lists straight off beautifully and let's try this little 5x7 mm uh oscillator module shall we? Let's give that a go. There we go. Lift straight off, no problem at all. Love it Taada! Now there's the BGA device which we sucked off and as you can see, it's a very small uh ball pitch.

I think it's less than5 mm pitch and that came off quite nice. Now you could actually reball that BGA but there's a whole art in uh doing that and there's machines that allow you to do that sort of stuff. But there you go. And it comes with various size nozzles as well.

but I found I Really virtually never use the large ones. I Typically only need to use the smaller nozzle like this, but your choice. It comes with an anyway. So that's the Atton Instruments 858d plus hot air rework soldering station.

There's not much you can really review on a hot air station. It works. I've been using it in the lab here for a while now and It works. pretty well.

No problems at all. Compares Pretty favorably with the Hao and other brand Uh ones I'm familiar with in the industry in terms of uh, you know, cap thermal capability to get parts off the board and stuff like that. Not a problem. It's got everything you need.

It's got very adjustable air. It's quiet I Like it. It's ergonomically. it's pretty good.

It's light, we, uh, it's You know it's got digital readout. seems to maintain its temperature pretty well. well. What more do you want? It's incredible value for money.

I Got just over 80 Australian dollars delivered. Unbelievable. It's absolutely no excuse for not having a hot air rework station in your lab, so go out and grab one at that price. Ridiculously good value for money.

I Guess the only question mark is what's its long-term reliability like? I Don't know. That remains to be seen. But The price. It can't go wrong.

Catch you later.