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Self-Soldering Circuits [video]
- paulkrush 4y agoThis is cool! One more notch in the theory of getting a true RepRap to reproduce...
- paulkrush 4y agoMy head went straight to designing boards that can solder themselves to other boards autonomously.
- jrockway 4y agoYouTube has been recommending this channel to me for a while. It was a long journey to get there, with a lot of prototype hotplates made out of PCBs along the way. Worth watching if you're bored some night.
- bityard 4y agoI have made self-unsoldering circuits before, do those count?
- vocram 4y agoOnly if it was a feature.
- a9h74j 4y agoTo demonstrate a mechanical analogy for impedance, something-something use electrolytics in place of diodes.
- taffronaut 4y agoOnly if the components actually remove themselves from the board. Bonus points if they make it to somewhere else in the room. Consider it like a faulty component quitting before it gets fired. I once had a bus transceiver that unsoldered itself from a card on an extender and ended up on the floor.
- AussieWog93 4y agoYou could probably launch a little SMD resistor quite far by deliberately popping an electrolytic cap...
- unwind 4y agoThat was fantastic. As far as I can tell it's an original idea which in this area is rather cool by itself. I guess I'm curious how much worse the heater-shorted-into-grounding-plane performs as compared to a classic full grounding plane. If anyone is curious about the cool-looking pcb holder used in the early shots, that's the Omnifixo [1]. It's been on my wanted list for a while but it's not cheap and often sold out (I think it's basically a one-man company). [1]: https://omnifixo.com/ https://omnifixo.com/
- fest 4y agoThanks for mentioning Omnifixo- when you said it's not cheap, I mentally prepared myself for a price tag of several hundred EUR. I find the ~60EUR price very reasonable (IIRC a single stickvise with PTFE jaws is around the same price point).
- unwind 4y agoGlad to help! Oops I guess that proves that I'm the cheap one. :)
- fest 4y agoWell, I did mill the PTFE yaws for stickvise myself, and was seriously contemplating building a stickvise style vise (as I pretty much have the needed tools)- until I needed some Digikey part ASAP and had to fill the cart to free shipping threshold :)
- Renaud 4y agoIt's a great hack and a cool demo that may have (very) limited real-life niche applications, but it's not really worth it unless you only make a couple of PCB per year and can't afford a small oven. Where this is great is that you can finely control the temperature of the board since you're in control of the current you pump into it. Where it's not great is that it uses a full layer and could cause issues if any of your PCB needs special considerations, when using high frequency clocks or RF (say implementing a switch mode power supply can be quite sensitive to how your layers are composed). You also end-up with either a floating layer or a ground layer that has a long path instead of a real ground plane. That could also create noise issues. If you assemble a few PCB a year, a PCB oven is fairly cheap. You can make one with a regular US$50 oven and a PID control kit or just buy a dedicated one like the T-962 (that can be further hacked and improved) for about US$250 from Aliexpress. But that hack is still cool and Carl Bugeja's channel[1] has lots of fun projects that push PCB to new limits for hobbyists, showing what you can achieve with flex PCB in particular and using them as mechanical interfaces for creating motors, actuators, etc. It's a great channel! [1]: https://www.youtube.com/@CarlBugeja https://www.youtube.com/@CarlBugeja
- Animats 4y ago> dedicated (reflow oven) like the T-962 The trouble with the T-962 is that the stock units heat so unevenly that you can scorch the center of the board while getting cold solder joints near the edges. I have one of those with the mods for improved firmware and better thermocouple references. It's OK. The firmware runs the fan all the time, even during heating, which improves the heat distribution. There's a better mod which adds a second fan. A number of companies in China made clones of those things, but none of them seem to have done a redesign to make a better one at roughly the same price. Now there seems to be a new generation of these things, with more fan power. That's a step forward. No idea if they're any good. (There are reflow oven review sites, as bogus as mattress review sites.) There ought to be a good $200 reflow oven by now. You can buy good small reflow ovens from the US and Germany, but prices are upwards of US$3000.
- fest 4y agoThere are relatively affordable vapor phase ovens- at $WORK I arranged the purchase of Vapor Phase One- it works really well. However, some people are more sensitive to the resulting smell.
- SynAck6 4y agoI have been following this Youtuber for a while now, and I have been amazed by his creativity and unorthodox use of flexible PCBs. Strongly recommend watching a few more of his videos
- franky47 4y agoAn interesting spin on the Mission: Impossible assignment devices. "This device will self-desolder in 5 seconds"
- key_stroker 4y agoI like the way he's screen printing the soldering paste.
- guerrilla 4y agoYes! I'd never seen that before in the hobbyist sphere and suddenly I don't hate SMDs.
- ilyt 4y agoMost board vendors can sell you the stencil for your PCB for very cheap
- iamflimflam1 4y agoYes, I thought this was pretty common now. I do it every time as it hardly adds any cost. It’s also worth looking at the costs for SMT assembly. Companies like JLC are amazingly cheap for fully assembled boards (provided you stick to their standard parts catalog).
- ilyt 4y agoI was almost going to do that for one of my projects, I got my design right on time for chip crisis to start.... But yeah, even for something like 10 boards the prices for assembly has become pretty reasonable, especially if you design for the parts they have in stock.
- makapuf 4y agoI consider soldering the board a bit too far on the externalize my hobby side. I like soldering those !
- voxadam 4y agoThe "screen" he's using in the video is called a stencil. They're made out out of thin stainless steel. These days they're pretty easy to come by, even for the hobbyist.[0] [0] https://www.oshstencils.com/ https://www.oshstencils.com/ (one of many hobbyist level examples)
- mikewarot 4y agoThis could be done with a normal ground plane by extending it out both sides of a board. A microwave transformer with the high voltage secondary cut out to make a 2 turn transformer could supply more than enough current... use a thermocouple the same way, and a Triac to control the primary, and Bob's your Uncle. Doing a row of vias on both sides then paralleling the top/bottom traces to make some big T shaped terminals might make it easier to get uniform current distribution.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y agohttps://youtu.be/LMT1sn1bKRY https://youtu.be/LMT1sn1bKRY
- amelius 4y agoThis misses the entire purpose of a ground plane. The point of a ground plane is that return currents can follow roughly the same path as the forward going currents at higher frequencies, so the inductive loop the combined path forms is as small as possible. Also, a real ground plane can provide shielding by allowing currents that oppose electromagnetic fields, but these currents have to go in loops also.
- femto 4y agoHe's built an "antenna plane".
- nixpulvis 4y agoYea, perhaps you could be clever with that as well later on...? Probably not the most precise design, but it seems honestly a lot less hassle than heating an oven.
- fr0sty 4y agoIt isn't really clear in the video, but that is a 4 layer board and there is another ground plane layer elsewhere. The heater loop doesn't connect to any components.
- Roark66 4y agoIt's an entertaining hack. I think it should be considered in this context. If we start thinking about it in practical terms it stops making any sense. Specifically, a standard 2 layer board costs few $ to make. Here we're paying a huge premium for extra internal layers. You may as well take that money and put it towards a hob with an scr and a cheap controller to solder them on it.
- alexvoda 4y agoThat actually depends on the specific costs. There is a clear business desire to replace capex with opex even when the resulting expenditure is higher. This achieves that at the pcb soldering level. It does not have to be a good idea to get traction.
- sen 4y agoPeople are missing the point here. Carls entire channel is filled with really cool experiments in making PCBs do things people wouldn’t normally think of. There doesn’t have to be a practical purpose really, he just loves experimenting. I really love his flexible PCB experiments too, he’s made a lot of awesome things from them.
- sandworm101 4y agoExcept i can think of many uses for this. A self-heating board is more efficient than heating an entire enclosure. A sensitive circuit or part could use this trick to efficiently keep key componants warm on demand without an entire external heating system. And dont let Louis Rossmann about this. Inbuilt desoldering circuits underneath key componants might make at-home board repair too easy even for his tastes.
- goodpoint 4y agoYou can heat up only the key components using resistors.
- sandworm101 4y agoYou can install toaster coils too. A pcb heater layer directly under a temperature-sensitive chip is much more direct, and thinner. I see a cold-weather cellphone with a touchscreen that can get up to workong temperature quickly.
- amelius 4y agoHeating is usually not the problem with electronics ...
- sandworm101 4y agoMaybe in the lower 48. Up north, all sorts of circuits get exposed to surprisingly low temperatures, resulting in all sorts of gremlins.
- 4y ago
- unhammer 4y agoInspired by https://twitter.com/twowordhorror https://twitter.com/twowordhorror
- nixpulvis 4y agoExcuse me, but did he just make a cheeseless pizza!? I guess baked tomato sauce will bind toppings a little bit, but you'll lose all the texture of the sauce this way :(
- Waterluvian 4y agoHe probably finds that with cheese he loses all the texture and binding in the bowel movements.
- SAI_Peregrinus 4y agoHistorical pizza is basically just any round bread with some sort of topping(s). Max Miller's Tasting History showed a 16'th century pizza recipe from the Vatican with powdered sugar and rose water for toppings[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6XvMKdD2tY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6XvMKdD2tY
- gaze 4y agoIt's a cute trick but I can't imagine a worse ground plane. People say ok -- this is fine for low frequency circuits. There is no such thing as a low frequency circuit when there's a microcontroller present since the clock edges have frequency content well into the GHz. The only way I could imagine getting away with this is if you sacrifice a layer to the heater and put a ground plane between it and the rest of the PCB stack as a shield. Still I think it would be better to scatter resistors around the board and heat sink them to a solid ground plane. I don't know. I love basically everything Carl does but if anyone is considering this seriously they need to learn a bit about Maxwell's equations.
- sbierwagen 4y ago>when there's a microcontroller present since the clock edges have frequency content well into the GHz For an atmega that's clocked at 16MHz?
- gaze 4y agoYes. The magnitude will be lower than an STM32 running at 100 MHz but they’re there. They’re usually benign and tiny but when your return path is a loop antenna then there’s a chance there will be issues.
- lightedman 4y agoThis is actually one of the designs we use at work for building connector-only PCBs (like what you'd find in track lighting raceways) because our FR4 board used for that application is so thin that it can't go into the reflow oven, it will flex and slip off the rails when it heats up. We just make one big PCB with an array of connector-only parts and a track heater built-in, run the board through the solder stencil, pull it out, place the connectors by hand, slap the board on a lapped-flat granite block with a heater under it, hook up power, and watch it until it reflows. We use an extremely-low temp bismuth solder that reflows just a bit above water's boiling point for these boards. Nice to see hobbyists in the field coming up with the same concepts.
- mrtweetyhack 4y ago[dead]