EEVblog #1114 - NEW TS80 USB Soldering Iron Review

hi in a previous video we took a look at a $5 USB soldering iron and whilst it worked and it might be kind of useful for some applications it's not something I would have any faith in whatsoever about you know being like robust and reliable and everything else so I thought I'd take a look at another USB soldering iron and this is the brand-spanking-new T SAT soldering iron yes it's kind of I guess the little brother is it of the TS 100 which everyone absolutely raves about but the good thing about this is that it is a USB powered iron as opposed to the DC barrel Jack used in the TS 100 so not nearly as convenient if you're out in the field so this could be really interesting it's a 70 I think it's 72 US dollars at the moment delivered on Aliexpress it's an order of magnitude more expensive than that cheapest $5 iron but as will no doubt see it's much higher quality so let's take a look at it I got the iron itself including that some adapters we'll have a look at I've got a nice little a carry case here which is really good for a portable soldering iron obviously some sort of portable stand but what it doesn't fit in the provided case unbelievable I've got an adapter because the adapter inside here we'll take a look at the iron in a minute let's see what else we got safety instruction there you go knock yourself out I mean they care about that solder and Alain gets hot that's all you need to know in there we get an allen key we get a USB see that feels real ah that's silicone that feels really sex on a stick that does very nice we've got ourselves a grounding strap neat server yes do you don't know where that hooks in and we've got a power adapter because this is not actually five volts USB it's actually nine volts two amps which is part of the quick charge 3.0 standard which here we go so we need an adapter there we go at nine volts two amps so it'll ramped up if it you know negotiates the higher power that's all part of the standard temperature range from 100 to 400 degrees C 9 volts input and a rated power of 18 volts 9 volts times 2 amps of course designed by a design and made in China so let's try the stand out here okay well figure out how to use that later will we yeah it's all sharp really don't like it I don't know why they bother now you have to be careful which one you actually order because it only comes with the one tip so I ordered the one with the beveled tip like this normally I believe that the standard one comes with a fine point conical tip which I don't particularly like for general use I believe I'm sure you can buy these things separately but I haven't looked but as you can see it uses a 3.5 millimeter TRS jack to plug into this thing and get the power through and the temperature sensor back because unlike the five dollar USB crap when we looked at this one is fully temperature controlled as well as being a higher power at 18 watts now I've got to say this looks and feels really good qualities as the TSD 2025 is it their tip and it looks and feels like really good quality I'm I'm suitably impressed by this and yes it is a direct heat technology iron so the element is integrated into the tip and it's right at the tip so it's thermal performance should be pretty schmick well for 18 watts anyway I have no idea why this part here screws off because this doesn't come out if you buy a new tip I believe you get the whole lot so I can only presume that's like a finger type thing to you know if your fingers touch that that's not going to get as nearly as hot as if it was completely integrated with the whole thing now the pencil itself looks and feels superb quality it has off there's our little ground strap very nice anyway anodized aluminium I really like it now this piece just screws off here but once again I'm not sure why because it's not like it locks in place you can just plug your tip in like that so I don't why that rings there hmm okay it looks like we've got two buttons here temperature is there one in the middle as well I'm not sure and let's peel that off tada we've got ourselves a little OLED screen but yeah that looks and feels great quality oh I didn't know that it actually has a sleep mode look at this at half of what 5 volts standby mode and but it's got standbys presumably different to the sleeping temperature there it goes down to 200 presumably to reduce the to increase tip life and they tell you're here at continuous use of 350 which is probably where you're going to be wanting to operate and iron like a small capacity iron like this up to 40 minutes the handle surface temperature will reach 50 60 degrees ie too hot to touch so yeah it's not going to be a production high-end but hey you don't expect it to be because this is designed for just you know 5-10 minutes use in the field and the earthing strap was certainly a nice touch so you could you know put that onto a computer chassis or or to your field ESD mat or whatever you want to hook it on to neat and it fits in the case very nicely there's room for another tip in there plus you can put a whole bunch of US solder in there but the stand doesn't fit so you ever find something else or just don't bother ok let's pair it on and see what happens oh there we go that's the sleep mode so it's in sleep heating set in heating setting it's not doing much heating with that sort of current draw oops I just hit the UP button sorry now it's not particularly heating up quickly at all there's the magic smoke escaping from the tip and but we are at the 9 volts and it's not quite the two am so it's not certainly not delivering the 18 what's claimed certainly not delivering full power ok now the first thing I don't know if this is the same interface as the TS 100 I've never used the TS 100 but I would have expected that up down think are there we go you've got to hold it down and then that goes in 10 degree increments ok that's alright and the center there is no center button by the looks of it it's got a velocity control that's really quick there we go you just have to let it timeout and 15 watts there you go so not quite the 18 but there could be some loss in the USB thing like I don't know I'm not gonna quibble about that and just sitting there doing nothing it's gonna draw you know five odd watts okay let's not muck around let's go straight for the ground plane test I don't know if it's going to do it we'll try it out using my standard lead-free Loctite solder so let's give it a ball here we go ah nice smooth as silk no worries whatsoever beautiful once again it seems to be drawing about 15 watts into that ground plane okay let's see if it's full of it it's set the 350 degrees already got some solder on there well it's certainly not accurate it's a good 20 degrees over hmm not not great and when you're going down in temperature it gives you the display like that by the way the OLED display it's okay I don't know what it's like outside but anyway let's go down to just 270 just because we can and it's more accurate down there it's only seven degrees out where we're pretty confident this we've measured it with other ions and cross correlated with other temperature sensors so yeah by the way I really do like that it shows the voltage on there that's really well good I'm not sure what this other display here is supposed to be I don't know thank you mm-hmm okay just for kicks let's see if we can solder a to-220 down to this ground plane shall we so let's give it a burl I've got a set to 350 by the way so it's a bit how you doing I know but I'm just curious to see if it can do that or not it's going on the tab geez you know like this is not something that I'd expect out of an 18 watt iron but gee look at that Wow that's not bad at all you can't complain for your 18 watts the the capability of this thing it's really quite quite impressive it's not easy maybe we can ramp the temperature up a bit and it probably do a better job with that leaded solder to by the way one thing I've found is that using this iron I'm always like hitting these buttons so yeah whether or not you know you can get it in a mode where that's a problem it's I'm sure it can happen here we go let's just get some 6040 stuff and see what we can do here once again still set to 350 and there you go you can't actually get in there like that and that is very impressive I know I'm taking way too long to why I do this I just want to see capacity iron and see that it flows but yeah I mean I didn't expect that and of a direct heat 18 what iron so yeah this has got really good direct heat technology in it neat and with that actually on there it's saying it's about you know 270 degrees or something like that so and of course if you set it to 400 then it's just going to go through that like butter wow that okay let's try some 15 gauge wire I'm back to our 350 degrees and lead-free solder so let's give it a bill and it makes light work of that just finish that off on the other side there Wow yep no problem whatsoever sweet ass alright so let's look at some of the other menu options here we hit this well you've got a hold down this side of the button we're into the settings and we can go into the working temperature through 50 the standby temperature which goes down to 200 I'm not fussed about a standby mode on an iron like this is sleep time 180 seconds power that's 18 watts presumably we can change that temperature stop don't know what that is I don't have a manual for this they didn't actually provide a manual off voltage 10 volts so I guess anything over 10 volts it switches off temperature degrees C or the Celsius and right-hand use or left-hand use nice so it'll flip the screen around and that's just what the current voltage and temperature is so to change the setting we just hold down that and bingo we can go in and the power we can actually go up to 24 so that's interesting give me more power I'll take that and to set it you've just got to let it go in like that and of course we have to find out if it can burn its own lead that's pretty good burn Priscilla can lead sweet as by the way I've had this on for like you know 10 minutes and I can keep my fingers on there and that's not even warm the other good thing about it's got a relatively short grip to tip distance which is really important for getting fine work not quite as good as a JBC but geez you can't complain and as far as I'm gonna mix go with the cable on there like you don't even notice that the cables on there it's absolutely fantastic it's waited quite well the balance is like really nice I rather like this one thing though like I've been using this for 10 minutes and check out that tip it's like it's blackened around there already not terrific I guess one thing this ring is useful for is that it does actually allow you to screw that tip off without touching it okay I'm very curious to know what happens if we actually don't have a quick charge power bank available and we've only got a regular power bank in this case five volts are two point four amps capable see if it still works oh okay no it's really drew to most power is switched my power bank off okay but we're up we are up and running so it might just simply draw too much power so let's go let's go to heating mode low volt damn it's really disappear kappa Bulow bank doesn't work otherwise or other you know suitable power source but hang on if we turn the power down can we still do it I'll go down to 16 that's the lowest we can go I couldn't get to this menu when it was plugged in that power pack we needed the other power pack to do it though nope low volt nothing we can do about it so let's just do a very unfair comparison with the jb sheet and GBC shall we calibrated this to our 300 so precisely 300 degrees and it can just bite that ground plane there the JBC also at 300 let's give that a bell and that just goes through that like butter but of course there's no comparison there because this is a hundred and 30 watt capable line you can see that you know it's for an 80 watt iron it's super impressive alright how does it handle multi-layer board at 350 degrees Celsius no problem whatsoever alright I set the standby timer there it is bang on 60 seconds so it'll go down to 200 so if we pick that up hopefully it'll come back nope oh yeah you got to shake it a little bit there you go so there must be an accelerometer in there to do that you know that's alright I don't think it's a feature needed on something like this but some people like it aha check this out I just discovered that if you turn the off voltage up it was 10 volts before but if you go up to its maximum of 13 volts we can get more power out of this thing I'll show you so look at this going up we're now drawing 20 20 Watts there you saw it and if we start some soldiering I was able to get it up to over 20 watts 20.4 so higher than its rated 18 very nice you can see the voltage now at least on this with this particular supply shopping up to 10 volt so it's not like it's jumping up to that 12 volt quick charge mode so I'm not sure what's going on there but it certainly can get extra power out of that nice okay let's do the old wet sponge test shall we here we go there we go it's yeah but hey for the capacity its root stuck it's stuck oh but of course it's more than good enough for the job we're just mucking around now okay let's open up this puppy have a look inside how do we get in there hmm the I reckon this switch has to has to come off somehow there's probably a screw under there well that's the trick you get your knife in there like that and it's almost purposely designed to do that and today the supplied allen key fits winner winner chicken dinner and this hysterectomy oh yeah there we go it pops off tada we're in like Flynn check it out there's our little OLED display let's just stuck down just got some sponge there and we've got our micro it's an STM 32 micro I believe let's flip the board open looks very nice from the top side if we slide that forward a bit we'll come out and tada Esad there you go I mean the the design of the casing and the design of the board and everything else is really very very nice ts ad version 1.7 for those playing along at home so they've gone through a few revisions in here and that so8 there's obviously the power MOSFET you can tell by the pin out the nice chunky trace has gone across there surface mount three and a half millimeter socket this looks a reasonable quality like how do you tell a poly switch fuse on the input that's very nice and this that that's an inductor so this is obviously a DC to DC converter why so there we go we've got a diode there and the inductor so we can look up the data sheet for that DC to DC converter a Q 4335 MOSFET I'll include the datasheet if we have it got a little trainee there by the looks of it and up the front that is going to be our thermocouple tip sensing amplifier there so that's really quite a nice design let's flip it back over and there's our switches again and there's our St stm32 our micro so don't know if there's any because there's open source firmware for the TS 100 I believe so I'm sure it won't be long before people hack this thing as well but like do you need to I don't know it seems to work just find the interfaces a bit fiddly but I wouldn't wouldn't quibble about that and there's no accelerometer and there's a spare footprint next to it unpopulated that's probably for an alternative type just in case they can't get it I thought maybe it's a JTAG header like the programming interface but it doesn't seem to be so I don't think you know this thing doesn't have any ready programming interface for it so there you go that's the new T SAT USB C soldering iron and I think this has got Weiner written all over at the design and build quality is excellent the thermal performance is excellent for the power available in this thing it's more than what you'd need in most cases unless you're doing really super heavy you know the bullet connectors or something out in the field I don't know the T is 100 maybe better in that respect because it's a higher wattage iron but for me I know a lot of people won't agree but for me the USBC interface is just much nicer than the DC barrel jack on the TS 100 and for those who think that the strain will be a problem on this this applied silicone leaders not only burn proof but it is super lightweight and there's no stress on that at all you don't even notice it so I think it's fantastic it's really hard to fault this thing the only thing wrong with it of course is that it doesn't work on anything but a quick charge compatible IVA AC adapter like we used here or a power bank and I don't have a quick charge power bank you may not have a quick charge compatible power bank so you might that might be an extra expense you might have to go out and get one but I think it's gonna be really worth it this is a real nice quality I and if you're looking for a portable temperature controlled iron it's fantastic that's really the only downside is that lack of compatibility with existing I don't mind that it uses USBC is great it's the it's the connector that they should be using but it should be backward compatible with our previous standard because the existing USB standards can give like five charging ones can give 5 volts at 1.5 amps no problems whatsoever so you can get you seven half eight watts which we saw in the previous soldering iron so I don't know why they don't do a fallback for that maybe it's just a firmware fix that'd be nice if it was but if you can't it's a bit of a shame but still even having to buy a quick charge our power bank which I'm going to do now so that I can carry this thing around because it's just great I love it I'd rather have it over the even though I haven't used the TS 100 I don't need in the field I don't need any more power than this thing's got it's more than capable enough and I just like the fact that it works with an existing power bank and I don't have to dick around trying to find some other power source so I hope you enjoyed that and if you did please give it a big thumbs up and as always you can discuss it down below on the EEV blog forum and for those who don't know I do often although not always release my videos early to patron supporters so link down below if you want to become a patron thanks catch you next time [Music]

Channel: undefined

Views: 225,704

Rating: 4.871532 out of 5

Keywords: eevblog, video, ts100 soldering iron, ts80 soldering iron, usb soldering iron, usb soldering iron review, hakko, portable soldering iron, ts80 review

Id: _Z9es-D9_8g

Length: 22min 21sec (1341 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 11 2018