Hi Everyone loves soldering stuff Here on the Eev blog, there're some of my most popular videos, my soldering tutorials. Well, today we're going to take a look at Uh and review I Guess. play around with a Reflow oven controller kit from Beta Layout. They're a uh oh there it is comes in a huge box.

They're a German company who started uh, the PCB Pool Service almost 20 years ago. Now where you know we take it for granted these days. that, uh, you? You know there's lots of companies out there that will take your files and put them on a shared panel and that's how we get our lowcost PCB manufacturer these days. Well, they started it 20 odd years ago with the PCB pool though one of the first companies to do it and they're still going strong and they offer this beautiful, um, sort of, you know, all-in-one starter kit for SMD Reflow because they as part of their PCB pool uh Serv PCB prototype service.

They offer a free SMD stencil with every board and they've provided me. and they also sell this all-in-one kit so we're going to check it out. Should be interesting. Let's go.

Now here's what I got in the box. and yes, my box Cut does contain more than your usual box, but what is in the usual uh kit? just the Reflow uh soldering kit itself is no, it's not a toaster oven. it's a Reflow oven. If you think it's a toaster oven, you're not thinking fourth dimensionally.

Um, it's from uh sein I don't know I've never heard of it I don't even think you can buy it here in Australia it's a European uh brand I think we'll take a look at that, but uh, we've got ourselves a oven with a nice clear door and um, that comes with the Reflow kit which we'll take a look at which includes a multimeter and a whole bunch of stuff and the paste and things like that and just that kit alone is sorry. um yes, 129 for that and or1 178. uh us. now also for another 129.

I've got the Reflow oven controller kit which uh turns this toaster oven into a Reflow oven or controlled which we'll get into. but uh, unfortunately this is 240 volts only. so I don't believe they sell this in the US um so if you're in 11 Vol 10 volt country I think you are out of luck it's not on their American uh store. but anyway, so they're 129 each.

I don't know how that translates into various countries in the European Union and uh, stuff like that in terms of uh, value, but yeah, you can probably get it. you can just buy this on its own. sorry, you can just buy the Reflow kit on its own which is uh $91 I'm not sure uh what it is in Euros and you can buy your own toaster oven. There's nothing in particularly special about this uh, toaster oven at all.

You can pretty much use um, anyone on the market cuz as we'll see, the Reflow controller has a learn button on it, which uh, basically profile learns and profiles itself based on the thermal oven that you've got. Hello, you can see me. There you go. Um, this San brand oven.

I You can buy this separately if you want, so you can just buy the Reflow uh kit Basics kit and buy your own Uh, if you can get this cheaper then you know by all means do it. You don't necessarily have to uh Buy from Beetle layout and uh, it is just your typical, uh, direct heat toaster oven. It is not a convection oven so there's no fan inside to actually, you know, circulate the hot air. They are, technically, uh, better because they give you a more even, uh, you know, temperature distribution with inside the thing.

but this is just a crumb uh, tray on the bottom here so you don't even need that. Um, two elements on the bottom, front and back there. and there's another two elements on the top up under there. So there they are up under there.

So technically you know, the issue with these Reflow ovens is that technically you can get hot spots. Now it's recommended. uh, that you have this in the center Of course, like this, but because there's no, uh, convection in there, there's no fan to blow the hot air around. Technically, you could get hot spots on your board and that's not necessarily a good thing.

So um, this is just a normal oven. But hey, it's going to be good enough, especially when you put the Reflow oven controller onto it. I Probably wouldn't recommend a non-con convection um oven if you don't have a Reflow controller. but hey, you know everyone has their own experiences I'm sure there people will be saying yeah I Got no problems using my uh, you know, non-c convection oven without a controller and it works just fine.

But the issue with the control the thing with the controller is that you know you don't have to manually time anything or anything like that and you know it's going to give you a semi-professional sort of Reflow profile and control wise it's just a manual uh, timer which you're not going to use and basically, uh, whether or not you want the top elements, the bottom element or Jewel elements. In this case, they recommend using the Dual elements top and bottom. so it Heats it from the bottom of the board and heats it from the top. Try and heats it evenly and then we've got our temperature which goes from 100 up to 230.

But basically you want to just for operation because it's got the external controller, you just want to set it to maximum dual element and Bob's your uncle you. Then the Reflow controller does everything. It's got a temperature probe in there and it actually can control the heating elements externally. So these Reflow controller kits they want.

You know you really need one of these dumb ovens. I Mean it doesn't even have a you know, it's got an off switch, but you know you basically just want to leave the thing on. It's dumb. It's got no intelligent controller in it so it can be without being hacked.

All you can just put the controller in series with the mains plug and it just switches the elements um, off and on and can use the P ID control Loop to control the temperature inside once you put a uh temperature sensor in there. But as far as uh, toaster ovens go, I Don't mind the feel of this. it seems to be you know, reasonable quality Now what you want in a good uh, thermal Reflow oven like this: Nice big clear glass window so you can see exactly what's uh going on there. Absol Absolutely essential for Reflow work.

It's got nice feet on the bottom of to lift it up above your bench and it feels like a reasonable quality unit. You know it's not high price, it's probably like 50 bucks retail or something, but yeah, it does, uh, feel decent quality and it's got a total internal uh space of 300 mm across. There easily fits my microcurrent panel as you can see and depth a good 300. So we're talking 300X 300 mm boards so that's a pretty decent capability.

You're probably in most cases don't want to do panels any bigger than that. And then our Reflow starter kit here, which you can buy uh, separately as I said. or you can buy the individual Parts separately if you just need them. Um, but this is all convenient in one box.

It's got just a 3M Scotch masking tape here to hold down the boards. We've got a a power adapter a looks like a UK to um EU power adapter or something like that. We've got ourselves our lead free uh, solder paste. This is about uh, 20 bucks retail or something like that.

so that's 100 grams worth. So that's going to do A decent number of boards there lead free and we got ourselves a spatula. metal spatula that's going to work really well. Um, we've got ourselves a cheap ass.

Peak Tech multimeter. Look at this pile of garbage. but uh, you know they just throw this in just in case. Oh something just fell on my toe.

Oh, that hurt that hurt. Oh man, don't know what it was anyway. Peak um multimeter manual range thing. They just throw this in.

Oh look, they've even got their own Beetle layout sticker on there. Look at that. and um, just some crap multimetal leads. No, there's the temperature probe.

uh, just in case you didn't have one. but there's also a temperature probe with the Uh Reflow oven uh kit which we'll take a look at and inside. Then we've just got some Uh boards. We've got a Uh training stainless steel uh, stencil so that you can do some um, uh, trial stuff on there.

and then we've got uh, various, uh, just uh uh blank boards which you put down templates that you can just slide your board into and hold it in place with these angle pieces as we'll see. Oops, I left these out of the box, but they do come with it. Last but certainly not least, they've got some uh example components so various sizes 1206 down to 0603 so 23s and So8 to match your Uh training board and some very nice looking Uh Vtus brand Swiss um SMD tweezers Awesome! but this is where the real magic happens. The Reflow oven controller kit so you just plug it in series with either this toaster oven or any toaster oven and it turns it into an intelligent Uh profile.

Temperature profiled SMD thermal oven comes from Ireland Awesome! So this one is as I said 129 and it looks really good. Here's the temperature probe which plugs into the front of this thing. Let's have a look and this looks really top quality. You know that's just really nicely done.

I Like that it's got various preheat soak Reflow modes dwell and a learn mode. As I said, you just press the learn Button as we'll uh see and it learns. The profile of your oven sets it all up and you plug plug your temperature probe in there and uh Main's power in 240 volts only as I said Mains power out which then goes in series with the oven and it's got Rs2 232 interface as well and they did send me where is it a Um USB RS 232 converter which I don't think comes with it I think you have to buy that separately or you can buy that from anywhere on eBay or anywhere else and I thought I'd have to hack the weird ass European Plug on the toaster oven but I don't It comes with a nice Um adapter which then just plugs into the back and plug that straight into your toaster oven. Brilliant! And it looks like assuming the serial number is quential.

they've made quite a few of these. 4,296 1500 wats Max This particular toaster oven uh is coincidentally, uh, 1500 Ws. and as I said, 230 volts only. So I don't believe they have a model? uh yet.

Maybe there's one in the works. uh for the US market. But yeah, if you want 110 volts sorry, this one's not going to do the business for you. And you know what we say here on the EV blog.

Don't turn it on, Take it apart. If I can get it apart, let's see what this puppy has to offer inside. There we go. Oh, that's pretty neat.

Nice little controller board. Looks like we have ourselves a big ass uh yeah, we got ourselves a big ass solid state relay down there from Sharp, but it looks like we have a good look at that nice little um PCB Mount uh Transformer there from girth. By the looks of it, it's a fused everything's hunky dory. It's got an external fuse here and that really looks, uh, quite neat.

Oh rather I like that. So yes, that is a Sharp 16 amp solid state Reay s216 S2 4 K isolation mounted on a nice little heat sink there that really is, Uh implemented. quite nice. I Rather like that they've got a um, small HRC uh fuse down in here for that and you know it's just all nicely integrated, completely safe.

not a problem, and we got ourselves an At Mega 32 there Rs232 interface ship and a thermocouple amp. and that's all she wrote just down the bottom. Just we've got a a So8 voltage rig there and just the Uh rectified AC input from the Transformer Too easy. And they also sent me an example of my latest microcurrent design board.

They actually panelized this for me in the 2x two format as an example of their Uh PCB pool service. And the whole idea about the PCB pool service is that it comes with a free stainless steel stencil. So you get your board made and you get your free stencil. Not a crappy Mya one, but a proper stainless steel one like you get from a profession.

Professional? um, you know SMD uh manufacturer for professional production so that'll last for thousands and thousands of boards. Excellent I Love it. and um, yeah, their board quality looks quite good. They sent me uh, green? that's their standard uh finish.

They can do other colors and stuff like that to order, but they wanted to give me an example of their actual uh production, their regular production process. And as you can see, um, because I only gave them the single board file. they didn't know how to panelize this I didn't tell them how to panelize it. So here's a just a quick um.

trap when you let a PCB manufacturer panelize your files for you. Now if you compare it with uh, the one that I did myself, you notice that they're in the corner like that because this is a front panel board I Deliberately specified in that. So when you cut it out with the side Cutters you get a nice clean and all your edges are nice and clean and everything. But because I didn't tell them how to panelize it just by default, they just whacked them anywhere so they've put them in for me as as this being a front panel in the most inconvenient, uh, location possible which is on the side.

So when you go and cut these things out, you're left with like a horrible looking side on them. And that's a lot worse than doing it on the corners. Now you know if you're doing a front panel like I am, that's really important. but if you're just doing a regular production Bo regular board that you know goes inside a box and no one's ever going to see.

it. doesn't matter of course, but I just wanted to point that out. That is a trap for young players about letting the PCB manufacturer panelize your board. and I talked about this on uh, this morning's Ampow that I just recorded.

so uh, check that out now. Normally I'm not a fan of green boards, but I actually really like it's more like an olive color when you've got the of course I've got a ground plane on top there so you know. here's the regular green cuz there's no copper under it but you put that copper under it and it just goes this nice olive color and I actually really, really like the um, the standard green with the copper under it. That's just a beautiful color on it.

and um I can't find any manufacturing uh, faults with this uh board at all. We'll take a look. I'll get the macro lens out, take a look in more detail. there's the bottom of the flip side of that.

They've just got it all right. We'll have a look at the um uh via hole alignment and stuff like that. Let's go to the macro lens. now.

the first thing you notice is that this is clearly not a photo imageable um overlay. uh, component overlay, white component overlay. It's all uh, you know, dot matrix uh, printed and you know you can see that. Yeah, you can see the lines in there and it just doesn't look nearly as good.

You can see that you know the text doesn't turn out that great. So I certainly wouldn't use this as a production board, that's for sure this particular process. So if you compare this which I got from Project PCB this is going to be my production panel. The quality of that is, you know, even though it is, uh, still that uh, dot matrix, uh technique, it's not photo imageable.

It still, you know, is much better than the PCB pool one, unfortunately, which didn't turn out that great. So but for prototypes, eh, it's adequate. Don't really see any uh, misalignment on those V holes either. So I think they're at4 mm on A8 mm pad.

Not a problem and no problems on the really thin Slither of solder mask. I think that's like 4 TH or something going through there. Not an issue at all. So these PCB pool pcbs are perfectly adequate for uh, prototype, uh stuff.

But the yeah, the quality of their overlay does let them down. Sign signicantly I think I'm not not entirely happy with that for prototypes? fine, Wouldn't touch them for production though. And the stainless steel stencil lines up perfectly as you'd expect. Yeah, that's just me around there.

Unfortunately They only gave me the stencil for a single board they don't didn't give me the stencil for the entire forbo panel. I'm not sure if that's a usual or just that's a quirk of the one they sent me. So the issue with that of course is I can't Reflow um well I can't assemble all of these boards and apply the paste like this because if I sure I can line that up, use the squidy, apply my paste on those pads. but then if I move it over to this one, it's just going to ruin.

Squish all the pace there. So what I'm going to have to do is uh, break out the individual boards and just do them one by one. That's a bit of a bummer. I Would have preferred to get the full stainless steel stencil for my entire panel and by the way, it comes with an instruction manual on uh, disk as well so you can read this explaining how to do this and how to use the re flow oven controller.

Now what I've done here is we're going to apply the Soler Place Let's get right into it. and uh, basically this right angle board acts as a template so you just, uh, stick that down there like as as a template retainer. so you just stick that down in place like that and then your board which can just sit in, it just sits in the corner like that. and then you get one of these corner pieces and you tape it down.

So when you're applying the squidy across the top of that, once we put our stencil on your board, doesn't move. That's just the whole idea behind that. Now we want to put our stainless steel stencil on there. and there we go.

It lines up perfectly if you take a look at that. Beautiful. There's a bit of Art in getting these things uh, lined up, but uh, generally Good Enough by eye like that and we only want to put one strip of uh tape along this edge here. So when we've done, when we're done with the squidy, we just want to lift the flap up like that so we don't, you know, dick around with it and disturb our nicely placed solder paste.

So let's get ready to go and let's have a look at the solder paste we're going to use here. It is Aim brand which are one of the top Uh brands in the industry. No clean, leadfree, tin-based solder paste. and it's important to get the no clean stuff.

It means it doesn't leave behind any crappy residue that you got to clean up on your board as a post Reflow process. So that's really good. Anyway, this is typer NC 254 That's the model number Sac 305. Don't confuse it with the NC 254, which is you can get in a lead leaded version.

This is the lead free stuff. Looks like we got a fair bit left on the expiry date there. This stuff uh data sheet says it has a shelf life of uh 9 months if kept between 4 to 10 degrees C or 4 months if left at uh, room temperature. but for you know, just prototype around like you know where we're doing here.

You can probably keep this for 12 months at uh shelf, uh temperature. It's probably still going to be us it you just mix it up a bit. It's just that the uh uh you know the volatile chemicals inside the solder flux in there. Just you know over time just leak out or do whatever.

they just you know. but you can mix in some flux afterwards if it is like dried out a bit. But anyway, let's not go into that. so 100 G worth It'll do a decent amount of stuff so this is what it looks like inside.

There we go: 100 G of solar paste Tight asses. They can't give you a full tie can they? anyway? Um, this comes in various type sizes. uh from T3 to T5 T5 have smaller solda BS than T3 comes in T3 T4 T5 industry standard sizes I Don't see any t- marking on there so I'm not sure what size uh solder balls this particular one is. And here's the data sheet which I'll link in down below and it extols the virtues of this wonderful solar past a broad printing process, wind window, and uh, reduces voiding under micro Bgas and there we go.

This is important 12 to 14 hour tack time. So when we apply our solder paste here to our stencil, we've got basically half a day to of good working time to apply our components to the board. maybe 24 hours on the stencil so you know Anyway, it's you know you've in no hurry, essentially the place or your components down. so that's really good.

When you're hand placing stuff, there's all sorts of printing recommendations here. look at this, the squidy pressure stuff like that. but you know when you're doing it by hand with your squidy like this I mean obviously you know, not really controllable. but when you've got as I've shown in a previous video which I'll link in when you've got automated squidy machines, um, you can actually set and program all this uh, sort of pressure and stroke speed into your machine so you want to.

you know there's all different types of soldar Pac more on the market than you can poke a stick out and you have to set up your solder Pce machine in production to match the exact typee of type of solder Pce you're using. And there we go. There's all sorts of you. know the snap off distance of your um stencil and you know separation distance.

Ah, all sorts of stuff they really go to to on how to use this stuff. And here's our all important uh, temperature Reflow profile and basically the reason it looks funky like this is because they're basically the windows you have to operate in so you got to keep your temperature at each particular time Point Somewhere with inside this window, you know it's very broad down here with the preheat kind of stuff. Doesn't really matter, but once it gets up to this critical region, you know you got to keep it with inside that window to get Optimum Reflow solder and then the cooling period. And that's why it's You know it's best to get one of these Reflow oven controllers.

At least it's going to be repeatable and attempt to get a profile even though we don't have a proper convection oven or a you know, proper IR oven or something like that. We've only got a toaster oven here for goodness sake, but combine it with the reeflo controller and we can get something that looks like one of these profiles. They got one for low density boards and another profile for high density boards as well and you'll notice that the temperature there we go. You know it.

Peaks Around that uh, 230 Mark And as you saw on the oven, this particular oven's only capable of 230, but it's going to do the job. That's just enough and we have a visitor who is it. It's Sean and she who must be obeyed Sean wants to come in and play with the Reflow oven. He's more interested in the MakerBot than the Reflow controller and there we go.

There's the Uh Micron sizes for the little balls for the different Uh types there and you've got all the technical details you could possibly imagine surface insulation resistance, and H more sorts of stuff than you can POG stick at a look Tac test uh, test results and stuff like that. They've got various PC uh standards for this sort of thing and well, surface mount Reflow soldering is not easy folks. it's almost rocket science. And of course, all these uh thermal profiles.

these aren't you know, absolute Uh values. These can change depending on your type of components, your board, and things like that. Because if you got some real critical components, you you know you got to watch out and make sure that your thermal profile is going to match those critical components as well. So here we go: I've got my uh, stainless steel stencil just uh set there as a flap like that.

so as I said, we can peel it off at the end and uh, we shouldn't disturb our Sant Now let's get our paste out. We'll uh, put a little bit on here. you've got to mix it after you get it in and uh, this can be tricky business. We won't need much, only need a tiny little bit today.

so let's just put a little bit on there and then we just want to have a player around with that. Just give it a bit of a mix. There are better ways to mix it than this. Now, if you're taking it out of the fridge, you do want to let it.

Uh, cool down to uh, uh. the uh. room. uh sorry.

warm up to uh, room temperature. But anyway, let's take that now and let's give it a go, shall we? We'll start like that and just move across like that. There we go. We got some in there and whoop, there we go.

I Probably should have done some more mixing than that. Probably a few people screaming at me at the moment that it's not Optimum but you want to get a bit of an angle on that and I could have got that in one stroke if I knew what I was doing. Anyway, that looks pretty good. Well, good enough.

Anyway, we'll just peel that back like that and we should be left with a nice amount of paste on each pad. Let's go get a Clos in. Look, there's our 0805 pads. Not absolutely perfect, but certainly good enough.

And you can see the paste applied. There's our So 23s, our 126ers, 126ers. Oh man, they're as big as houses s So8 Massive. No problems there at all.

but uh. there. there we go. We should be able to.

And of course our little 06 03s oh that one down there is a bit of a bit of a loser, but that's got more than enough paste on there to do the job anyway, so that's just going to work fine. There you go. You can see that up close there. the T you can see if you're watching this in HD you can probably see the tiny little balls in that solar pce.

and there's that little slightly failed 0603. we just uh s so8 over here. you'll find that there's a solder M between pads. All right, we'll Place some parts I've got some five So 23s here.

We'll use the uh SMD uh tweezers that came with it personally I don't like the hook uh type like this but H each to their own. We'll give it a go and hand place. You don't have to get the alignment too spot on. they're all upside down of course and uh, don't for get the alignment to spot on because the component will.

When the solder paste uh, reflows they will uh self Center into the pads and that's the beauty of SMD You just got to get them near enough and uh, although it does vary with component, we'll place our 126s here. These are as I said, 126s big as houses. These things are absolutely enormous. Anyone who can't SMD solder using uh by hand using 126 components really? um, needs to get their eyes checked because Stevie Wonder could uh s hand solder 1206 partch You want to give them just maybe a little push down there to get them onto the pads and uh, well.

I'll finish the rest of them now I don't care how good you claim to be o 603 starts getting down into the territory of being a little bit annoying for hand soldering and hand placement. Um, certainly when we're talking hand soldering I mean I can I think I You know I can solder 0603 is not a problem by hand without any uh without any uh magnification. But then when you get to 0402 I find I really need magnification Really helps, but 0603 generally pretty darn annoying. but that's what I got on my microcurrent wasn't designed for hand assembly.

If I'm designing stuff for hand assembly, I'm going to stick to 05 Um, I'm going to stick to 0805 and so packages and so 23s now. I've got my Uh Reflow controller hooked up in series with the oven here and the soak lead is flashing there. That means that we haven't plugged in our temperature sensor. Now with the thermo couple here, we need a dummy board inside this uh chamber to uh, get the heat from Now should be a similar material similar type to what you intend to uh solder.

So I've just got a standard 1.6 mm Fr4 board here I've just uh, thread the uh thermocouple wire through here just to give it some stability so it doesn't uh Shake loose and then I've just uh, of course you don't solder it in one of those holes I've just, uh, you know, placed it down in one of those holes so we'll place this in the middle of our oven and that will be our control board where this, um, thermal Reflow controller will learn the temperature from. So there we go. There's our board in the center of the rack now ordinarily I'd have this rack uh up one a bit more in the uh Center but there's actually not an exact center point um in here. But because I want to get some Uh video I need to have my board near the front of the edge down a bit.

So I want to get some video through the glass here so you know for for production you would want to put it in the center. but uh, I'm going to, uh, do it over here Anyway, it's hooked up. it's got it coming out the door Now this is, you know, just a cludge at the moment. I might actually, uh, take the covers off this thing and see if I can feed in for a more permanent setup the Uh thermocouple Pro through the inner wall or something like that and then have the Um board sort of, you know, semi-permanently set up in there.

Now it's flashing. the learn lead is now flashing. That means that this box comes. well, dumb.

It hasn't learned this uh uh oven. So we've got to put it into learn mode now. and um, it will just heat up the oven and will learn. This is one one of the things I really like about this oven.

It'll uh, check out the profile and set it up for any oven you choose. Really simple I like it assuming it works all right. let's turn this thing on. just go through a sequence there and the learning lead is flashing.

So what we're going to I've got my uh fluke hooked up as well with the. thermocouple. Now this thing should, uh, heat up. the in learn mode should heat up the oven to 100.

C So I can get a reference point and then stop. So let's press the learn button and there we go. It's on the light. uh doesn't seem to come on.

So I don't know, is it? Oh yeah, no, sorry, it's on. You just can't see it. It's quite. uh, it's quite dim.

Oh I can see some smoke coming out. So uh, this thing is, uh, probably to be expected being used for the first time. Jeez. I hope it doesn't set off the smoke alarm here in the building.

That would be embarrassing and my, um, my fluke thermac couple isn't exactly on the board. So I expect some error. Uh, there certainly all the not all the residual smoke seems to have gone. Not a problem.

Oh, there we go, There we go. So according to the fluke at overshot a bit, but as I said, that's not mounted on the board, it's not exactly uh, going to be spot on there. but uh, yep, that is uh done. It's finished.

So now it's learned that it's not uh, blinking anymore. So now we should just be able to run the soldering process and it should work a treat. Now you can see that the Uh Reflow lead is flashing here and what? That indicates that inside the oven is still greater than 50 C and it won't let you start a new soldering process until the oven gets down below 50. So that's one of the disadvantages with this thing is that uh, you do have to wait if you're doing.

uh, if you're doing boards, you know, big batches of boards in sort of, you know, a small scale production process. You got to let the oven cool down to less than 50 before you do your next board. So yeah, the rule of thumb is Jam as many boards in there in one go as you can and Reflow them all at once cuz this could take some time to cool down. And of course one of the Uh reasons for the discrepancy on the Fluke meter there is because the um, thermac couple of the fluke uh temperature probe there was just sitting in free air so it didn't have like the thermal Mass attached to the board like I've got uh for the other one in there so you'd expect the fluke to actually go a bit higher than the 100 C that the Reflow controller was expecting.

We're ready to we go, so let's stick our board in. Once again, it shouldn't be at the front like this. I'm just doing this so that I can possibly get some uh video so this is not ideal location because it's right under one of the elements here. Not that great a thing to do, but uh.

anyway, for the purposes of today's experiment and being on video, then that's what we're going to do. All right, we are ready to go so let's uh, run this thing. I'm trying to get a shot I've only got the 805s uh inshot here cuz I want to try and get the closeup. We should be able to see those resistors are self Center though.

So here we go: I'm going to press the solder button and uh, well, hopefully this sucker is going to work Here we go. We're in our preheat uh phase so this will take a bit and uh, this is designed to heat up the board slowly and evenly so that things don't CRA and the components so that things don't crack and uh uh do all sorts of uh, nasty little mechanical issues. So we'll start out with the preheat and then we'll go into the soaking phase which is designed to activate the flux inside the uh solder pce so that all the volatile chemicals inside the flux, they all burn out and then you hit the Reflow phase Wham that just Peaks it up and uh, reflows that solder and then after that, we've got the uh dwell time which is, um, the uh, the actual decay of the temperature. So um, all these things by the way, in this Reflow controller all these all these various parameters.

They are uh, setable so you can actually program this all via the serial. Port There's various serial Port commands to do this, but I'm just using this straight out of the box using its default values. So ah, who knows what's going to happen. But uh, okay, we're up to a minute 10 and we're still preheating.

There we go. We've just switched into the soak phase. my fluke says that was 118 and I can see that the element is uh, uh, switching off and on. It's switching the element off and on about once per second according to the uh, blinking light on the front of the oven.

there sort of, maybe you know, half second on half second off. uh, cycle time for that. So temperature slowly going up, it's still only 125 according to my fluke. And there we go.

We're into the re flow process at well, 153 it's saying, according to my fluke. there and according to the oven light, it's uh, the element is continuously on now, so we should see the temperature ramp up a bit quicker now. And the good thing about having one of these Reflow controls is that it does ramp up the temperature gently rather than just uh, you know, getting the regular toaster oven, just switching on the elements and you know, baking your board. This one at least has a modicum of control about it.

Here we go. you can see the solda starting to melt and a couple of those the ones on the left hand side there they have almost reflowed, but the ones on the right there haven't done so they're about to I think I can notice something happening there so as you can see, not an even temperature spread across that board And there we go. We switched into our dwell cycle and uh, well, we haven't had Reflow of uh, three of our resistors there I can't quite see the other components but I don't think they've fully reflowed either. So I'm not sure what the go is there.

Anyway, it's still going and we're back to a flashing Reflow lead. um I don't know I might have to go read the manual on that one. What's going on now? Well that um, according to the manual as before, it's um, it's finished but it didn't Reflow all of our parts in there a it's terribly disappointing and it didn't really, uh, pull them in place very well either. So this could be a fail, folks.

So that is terribly disappointing. And of course, uh, I'm not going to touch it. it's still. uh, it's still quite warm in fact.

Uh, these boards, as I've said in previous video, can retain their heat, especially if they got lots of ground plane copper in them. Uh, this board doesn't. but uh, still. it can not retain heat for a significant amount of time.

But we have a fail. I mean these components. Some of these components just have not reflowed I'll show you this when we take the board out. but yeah, what is it supposed to work out of the box and it doesn't disappointed.

Now as you can see, those so 23s haven't reflowed I mean some of the pins have there, but that's pretty much. well, it's certainly a fail. Um. and the Uh 0 805s as I said, a couple of them have reflowed and they look okay.

The 0 603s have reflowed not a problem there. and uh, the 126ers. No, no, only a couple of them have reflowed and our S So8 hasn't reflowed at all. and I just noticed something very dumb.

I Put put the Reflow controller up on the top of the oven here just for convenience for shooting this video. And of course, the top of that oven is very hot and consequently, the bottom of that box is very hot. as well. So I'm thinking that may have possibly affected the accuracy perhaps of the building? um, thermocouple? um amp perhaps.

so that's probably not the best. You really don't want to be sitting this thing on the top of this Reflow oven. D trap for young players? All right, let me try that again. I'm going to run through the learn process again and then run it through the complete uh cycle again with the board in the center and this is the real advantage of the really smart learn mode on this thing.

You can just, you know quickly, just uh, readjust it, re-calibrate it for any position inside your oven I you know, or in changing ovens and things like that. I Really quite like that. That works really well and I've started Reflow Soldering again. sorry I Can't get any video of this.

The board is like sitting smack bang in the middle of the oven and it's dark in there so it doesn't really work. Uh, getting a shot for these things quite difficult, but I Can certainly see it by eye. but uh yeah, the camera is not that great. All right.

we're in the soak phase now and what we're looking for here is to at least uh, on our fluke here, for the internal temperature of that oven to get at least to 200, say 25 or or degrees or thereabouts. Which puts it with inside of that Reflow uh window there Whoop! And we're into the Reflow process now. and uh, by the way, this uh lead on the front does actually match the heater element. So when that's on, it means the heater element's on and the light on the front of the oven actually, uh, duplicates that.

So if we don't see this, get to at least like 220 225 230c then well, something's you know out of whack cuz I'm assuming that my you know a good fluke temperature probe is accurate and even the chart that comes with the beta Reflow kit you know it's showing a Peak at Uh 250. this is for its supplied. no clean, uh, lead free solder paste. So in this Reflow process it says uh 2 uh, C per second, ramp up and are we 2 C per second? Oh not quite.

Anyway, we're getting close to our temperature now so this is pretty good. This looks like, um, it's going to do the business. 2 20 is close enough. So I think we're uh, uh, we're going to be in the ballpark and that board should have, uh, reflowed It'd be nice if there was a light in there.

Jeez, that would be neat. but uh, it's still in the Reflow phase. Uh, it's coming back down because it hasn't uh, hasn't switched the heater on there for a bit. But it, you know it basically according to our solder paste, uh, our actual solder paste data sheet.

there, you know, it got to 220. So it you know, near. it's pretty darn close to Bloody Fluke switched off. That's hopeless.

and uh, no, there we go. Oh, it's just switching on again. So there we go. Oh, there we go.

and we're in dwell now. But it's still uh, switching that element on. But anyway, that should have reflowed. So I'm gonna I'm going to claim that's you know, near enough in terms of Uh temperature.

I'll probably get a second multimeter and a separate a second thermometer in there as well just to check that out. But once again, um, but that's not the thermal. Mass though. remember this, uh, fluke temperature probe is actually, um, just hanging in free air in there.

So um, technically that actually should be a higher temperature than what. uh, the oven is. but any. Anyway, that is done, it is done and dusted, it is finished.

So what did it peek at there at about just over 220 or something like that. And the thing is, you can get in there with the serial commands and you can actually calibrate the thermo couple that comes with this thing. but it says in the manual ordinarily you shouldn't need to do that. but there is a manual mode where you can go in and actually, uh, actually calibrate its temperature and pre-program it into here.

There you go that looks like it's done the job. If we have a look there, there seems to be some sort of like residual flux left over or something like that. So um, I don't know whether or not it's I mean surely it's fully activated I mean you mean you're not going to get the uh, the solder reflowing unless that's fully activated? but I don't uh, know this particular type of paste offand and what it looks like after it's uh, reflowed but it barely got to temperature there? Um, and well, yeah, I don't know. It looks like it's done the business.

Although I think we are running a little bit under temperature there on our oven I think I don't think it's getting up to exactly what it should be. So what? I'm actually going to do? Uh, because I'm a bit, uh, concerned that this thing's a bit under temperature. I'm going to recalibrate the thermocouple in this thing now. There's two ways to do it.

One is to hook it up to a PC and uh, do it that way. or um, it's built in to the firmware in here and you can do, just do it like that and I'll show you how to do it. I've got two other thermocouples agilant and fluke in there. As you can see, they're reading, uh, slightly different.

so I'll just like split the difference or something temperature wise I think I'll probably you know we'll getting up to like just barely 220 before I'm going to set it maybe for 240 or there. About all right. So the way I do this is I press the learn button and as soon as the Onoff button comes, lead comes on. I press the solder button and then it'll turn the oven on.

Uh, full power soon as these two reach at 240. I press off and it should store the value in there. So here we go. Learn and oh solder.

There we go. hello hello McFly it's not heating up H What's going on? And looky here. The two thermometers are eventually, uh, settled down pretty darn close to each other. so I'm pretty confident in that.

what I've decided to do is hook on the Uh serial Port onto here and actually check cuz it's got a command to check what the temperatures reading. So if we go into 28 um to see if it matches 28 here I am in the serial uh console for this thing. So if we type temp show we expect to see a look see 36 see it's way out. No wonder it's read in and no wonder this thing was under.

So this thing it it came Cali you know out of the box was 36 C That's hopeless and that was why our board didn't Reflow properly. It was too low in temperature because it thinks it's higher. Um if it's you know if that was lower then it' go over 10. but it's not.

It's higher than what it actually is in there and well no wonder. And if we actually type the show all command it should would give us all of the current parameters for this thing and you can see that's you know, the uh, preheat uh, temperature, preheat time, preheat power, soak temperature. So all this stuff we can adjust manually if we want anyway. What we want to do is because that's uh 35.

It was 36 before and it's 28 in there. we're basically out by 7 and uh, if we go temp uh offset then you can see that there's no offset programmed in but we can. uh temp whop offset and we can put in minus 7. There we go.

We have now adjusted that and if we go attempt show, it should give us 28. There we go. Spot on. re-calibrated no worries.

and I guess folks, that is why they give you a multimeter and a separate thermometer with this thing. But how accurate it is I don't know I Don't think it's going to be as good as my fluke and my agilant one. Well, let's try this cheap ass multimeter shall we see what it tells us? eh? 26 Not too bad. only one de C resolution though.

All right, I've let it all settle down and I've come back. Well, the next day. Actually, it's the next morning and uh, 25 26 C So it's pretty darn close and my fluke and my agilant uh probes are bang on to within 0.1 de. So I'm pretty confident with that.

Um, so what I'm now going to do is ramp up the temperature in the Uh learning mode and just see if the uh Uh temperature at a higher temperature thermac coupling that matches the multimeter. so let's give that a go. Got some capped on tape there and I've got my Uh Agilant thermocouple probe taped into a hole next to so they're both making contact uh into holes next to each other on the board. So basically the same thermal Mass So we should be able to now track the temperature more accurately with our reference board in the oven with our agilant meter and you can see they're basically tracking pretty precisely now.

I Really like it. So I've got pretty darn good confidence with this thing now in terms of being able to actually track the real temperature. And also what I've got is the Bluetooth module connected to my agilant meter here and the data login app. so we'll be able to actually see profiles and stuff with our reference temperature thermometer.

Beauty So now what I'm doing is uh, log in the temperature in learn mode so we should see it go up to 100. Uh Celsius here cuz that's what Learn mode does. goes to 100. It follows the ramp, it times it, and all that sort of stuff and uh, it should switch off.

We were well off before because we weren't connected to the same thermal. Mass So here we go. So I got up to 135 in learn mode and switched it off and as you can see, it is slowly starting to just, uh, ramp back down now cuz the element's off. So there we go.

We can actually see the ramp on that thing and uh, look at that. It's a really nice curve. I Like that I just read the instructions for this. uh, learn mode and what it does is it.

Uh, once it reaches 100 C it actually switches off the Uh element and then what it does is it continues to track. uh, you know, and and learn. uh, how long how long it overshoots basically over that 110 or 100. Uh, Celsius So that's what's it.

It's effectively learning there how much it overshoots when it switches the element off. So there's 100. Where is it? There's 100 De there. so it switched it off at that point, would have switched off the element there and you can see that it's overshot.

Oh like that o I've zoomed in. there we go. but uh, so it. so it looks at that part of the curve there and now it knows how much it overshoot.

So I don't know. It applies it to some sort of intelligent algorithm, so it can now control the other presumably safely. So let's try this again in Reflow Mode. All right.

I'm going to start it again I'm going to do the full temperature profile and we'll see what we get cuz all we care about is what's actually on the meter. So push the solder button and uh, here we go. Okay, so what I've done is I've set my uh Reflow temperature to 230 uh here? I've actually programmed in that so we should expect to get a maximum of 230 C on on here. so we're looking and I can log the data with this serial command here as well.

So I'll go. What I'll do is I'll go temp show and then 1 second and what it does is it will. Every second it will just display new temperature there so we can, uh keep that running and I'll start my Uh login on the multimeter and on the Uh login app and I'll press solder and away we go. As you can see, we've reached 240 241 there even though it's set to 230.

So we have, you know, you know, a significant amount of overshoot there. not uh, Dangerous By any stretch, it's still within the um, you know the thermal. uh Reflow recommended uh profile of this thing so that's not too bad actually. especially given that um, you know this is a very small thermal Mass board so I'd be tempted to actually leave it at that.

um, because you know, like U components in my microcurrent, for example are uh, maximum recommended 250 so it's certainly under that. And when you put larger thermal Mass boards in there, um, you'd expect a slightly lower temp. So I think that's uh, pretty much ideal. Now it's um, it's still in the Reflow stage and it's still, uh, got the heater switched on.

but what? No, there we go. It's just switching off and on now and we're into dwell mode now. and uh, we're continuing to log this thing. but uh, yeah, I I think that's it's pretty Optimum it didn't uh, it's not overshoot to dangerous levels.

that's really all you care about. and uh, one of the real dangers of not having a proper Reflow uh controller on your oven. If you're just using the regular oven, be careful. you can see the profile there and you can see the three stage step there and that's exactly what they intended to do.

and that's exactly what you need for the profile, so it's not bad at all. Now we're up to the 10 minute Mark here now and that is taking a long time to ramp down. so I haven't opened the door so at this stage we probably want to. Well, when it's actually done um and goes beep, you probably want to open the door to ramp it down much quicker than that because if you have a look at the recommended uh profile for the paste, I mean you know there's no way our little uh pissant oven here can, uh, a ramp up that quick and B ramp down that quick as well I mean we're only talking, you know, 300 seconds there.

so you know really, probably best to just open the door at this point. So there you have it. There's the beater layout uh Reflow oven kit and I really do like this uh controller. it works quite well so I'm pretty happy with it.

Very confident now with that thermal profile that uh, the boards are whack in here will work and no doubt you'll see future videos on this where I assemble the uh, microcurrent and other boards as well. oh look, it's Dicky knee sorry Australian joke so you can get by with just a regular uh oven setting at at 230 uh doing timing. You can do similar thermal profiles to this to make sure it works and stuff like that. but I really like this uh controller I think it's probably worth every cent.

There's lots of other controllers on the market to these Open Source Hardware ones and things like that, but yeah, this is quite neat. so pretty darn happy with this. I'll make a little dedicated location for this and uh, I've got myself a pretty useful thermal. uh Reflow oven now which is, you know, pretty darn good.

I mean you know it's not professional grade, but hey, you know it can still do pretty decent quality boards in it without damaging components cuz now I thermally profiled it no exactly what it's capable of. It's not going to go over temperature. it's not going to damage my parts. can be pretty damn confident in it Beauty Catch you next time.