![]() The control system uses the (high) ambient temperature directly outside of the cooking chamber to regulate cook temperature in the box how it achieves any sort of temperature accuracy is boggling (it might not be remotely accurate I really haven’t tested it). The innards are all 28 gauge sheet steel, which has gaps where it was bent to shape. It makes no effort to insulate the cooking chamber from the outside world, which must make it very inefficient as well as hot to the touch. The inside of this unit illustrates exactly how cheap it probably was. ![]() And all of this should be possible without the unit needing to be tethered to an external computer, thereby keeping the footprint small. Semi-automatic cycling would be good, to press one button and come back in ten minutes to a finished board. The ability to sense temperature at the board or high-mass board components and provide provisions to optimize the ramp thereafter would also be nice. Proper profiling is desirable – that is, not only getting it hot enough to melt, but actually following the manufacturers’ specified ramps, which should lead to more reliable boards. But I have found that most homebrew designs lack the advanced features found on “real” reflow setups. Some are built on electric skillets, some in toaster ovens, some in custom made boxes, with varying amounts of complexity. There are plenty of projects on the Internet that document homebrew reflow systems. The company where I work has a nice six-stage production reflow oven, but I can hardly go asking them to fire that up whenever I need something made, so I would like to have a solution at home to do quick-turn work on my own. ![]() At this size it’s pretty much reflow soldering or the highway. I thus find myself wanting a way to process boards with no-lead and micro-scale parts. Unfortunately, industry has decided that 0603 parts and exposed pins are wasteful in space, and many really neat parts come only in QFN or BGA, and next to these, 0603 parts are absolutely gigantic. ![]() I can solder TSSOP and QFP pin by pin, and I work with 0603 size parts on a very regular basis. I would say I’m pretty good at hand soldering. ![]()
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