EEVblog #558 - Beta Layout DIY SMD Thermal Reflow Oven

hi everyone loves soldering stuff here on the eevblog there's some of my most popular videos my soldering tutorials well today we're going to take a look at and review I guess play around with a reflow oven controller kit from betta lay out there I oh there it is comes in a huge box they're a German company who started the PCB pool service almost 20 years ago now we're you know we take it for granted these days that you know has lots of companies out there that will take your files and put them on a shared panel and that's how we get our low-cost PCB manufacture these days well I started at 20 odd years ago with that PCB pulled on one of the first companies to do it and they're still going strong and they offer is beautiful um sort of you know all-in-one starter kit for SMD reflow because they as part of their PCB pool service 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 art kit just a reflow 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 four dimensionally it's from severe and I don't know I've never heard of it I don't even think you bite here in Australia it's a European art brand I think we'll take a look at that but we've got ourselves a oven with a nice clear door and that comes with the reflow kit which we'll take a look at which includes a multimeter and a whole bunch of us stuff and the paste and things like that and just that kit alone is a hundred and sorry yes 129 euros for that and or 178 US dollars now also for another 129 euro I've got the reflow oven controller kit which are turns this toaster oven to a reflow oven or controlled which we'll get into but unfortunately this is 240 volts only so I don't believe they sell this in the US so if you're in a 120 volt 10 volt country I think you are out of luck it's not even on their American store but anyway so they're 129 euros each I don't know how that translates into various countries in the European Union and stuff like that in terms of value but yet you can probably get it you can just buy this on it sorry you can just buy the reflow kit on its own which is our 91 US Dollars I'm not sure what it is in Euros and you can buy your own toaster oven there's nothing in particularly special about this toaster oven at all you can pretty much use them anyone on the market because as we'll see the reflow controller has a loan button on it which are basically profile loans and profiles itself based on the thermal oven that you've got hello you can see me there you go this severan brand oven I can buy this separately if you want so you can just buy the reflow I keep basics kit and buy your own if you can get this cheaper then you know by all means do it you don't necessarily have to buy it from b2 layout and it is just your typical direct heat toaster oven it is not a conviction oven so there's no fan inside to actually you know circulate the holder they are technically are better because they give you a more even you know a temperature distribution with inside the thing but this is a just a crumb tray on the bottom here so you don't even need that 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 that you have this in the center of course like this but because there's no convection in there there's no fan to blow the hot air around technically it could get hot spots on your board and that's not necessarily a good thing so this is to normal oven but hey it's going to be good enough especially when you put the reflow oven controller on to it I probably wouldn't recommend a non convection oven if you don't have a reflow controller but hey you know everyone has their own experiences I'm sure their people will be saying yeah I got no problems using my you know non 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 time at which you're not going to use and basically whether or not you want the top elements the bottom element or jewel elements in this case they recommend using the jewel elements top and bottom sort hits it from the bottom of the board and heats it from the top tray 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 control that 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 at all you can just put the controller in series with the mains plug and it just switches the elements off and on and can use the PID control loop to control the temperature inside once you put a temperature sensor in there as far as 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 thermal reflow oven like there's nice big clear glass window so you can see exactly what's going on there absolutely essential for re flow work it's got nice feet on the bottom off to lift it up above your bench and it feels like a reasonable quality unit you know it's not high price that's probably like 50 bucks retail or something but yeah it does feel decent quality and it's got a total internal wire space of 300 millimeters across there easily fits my micro current panel as you can see and depth a good 300 so we're talking 300 by 300 millimeter 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 in our reflow starter kit here which you can buy separately as I said or you can buy the individual parts separately if you just need them but this is all convenient in one box it's got just a 3m Scotch masking tape here to hold down the board's we've got a power adapter a looks like a UK to the EU power adapter or something like that we've got ourselves our lead-free solder paste this is about 20 bucks retail or something like that so that's a hundred grams worth so that's going to do a decent number of boards they're lead-free and we're going to sell as a spatula metal spatula that's going to work really well we've got ourselves a cheap-ass heat tech multimeter look at this pile of garbage but you know they just throw this in just in case oh yeah something just fell on my toe oh yeah that hurt that hurt oh man don't know what it was anyway Peak tech moly meetup manual range think they just throw this in oh look they've even got their own Beatle layout sticker on there look at that and to some crap multimeter leads night as the temperature probe just in case you didn't have one but there's also a temperature probe with the reflow oven kit which we'll take a look at and inside then we've just got some boards we've got a training stainless steel stencil so that you can do some trial stuff on there and then we've got various just a blank boards which are 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 example components so various sizes 1206 down to Oh 603 SOT 23 s and so8 to match your training board and some very nice-looking Vitas brand swiss SMD tweezers also 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 turns it into an intelligent Profile temperature profile SMD thermal oven comes from island awesome so this one is as I said 129 euros 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 there's got very sup pre heat soak reflow modes dwell and a learn mode as I said use press the loan button as will last see and it learns the profile of your oven sets it all up and you plug your temperature probe in there and mains power in 240 volts only as I said mains power out which then goes in series with the oven and it's got rs-232 interface as well and they did send me where is it a 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 have to hack the weird Arcite European plug on the toaster oven but I don't it comes with a nice 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 sequential they've made quite a few of these 4200 96 1500 watts max this particular toaster oven is coincidentally are 1500 watts and as I said 230 volts only so I don't believe they have a model yet maybe there's one in the works for the US market but yeah if you want hundred and ten volts sorry this one's not going to do the business for you you know we say you're on the eevblog 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 bigger yeah we got ourselves a bigger solid-state relay down there from sharp but looks of it we have a good look at that nice little arm PCB mount transformer there from girth but looks of it it's a fused everything's hunky-dory it's got an external fuse here and that really looks so quite neat a rather like that so yes that is a sharp a 16 ounce soil state relay s2 16 so2 for kilovolts our isolation mounted on a nice little heatsink there that really is implemented quite nice I rather like that they've got a small HRC 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 18 mega 32 there rs-232 interface chip and a thermocouple amp and that's all she wrote just down the bottom just we've got a so8 voltage reg rectified AC input from the transformer to easy and they also sent me an example of my latest micro current design board they actually are penalize this for me in the two by 2r format as an example of their 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 mylar one but a proper stainless steel one like you get from a professional professional you know SMD manufacturer for professional production so that will last for thousands and thousands of boards excellent I love it and um yeah their board quality looks quite good they sent me a green that's their standard finish they can do other colors and stuff like that to order but they wanted to give me an example of their actual production their regular production process and as you can see I'm because I only gave them the single board file they didn't know how to penalize this I didn't tell them how to penalize it so here's a just a quick trap when you let a PCB manufacturer penalize your files for you if you can pair it with the one that I did myself that there 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 paralyze it just by default they just whacked them anywhere so they've put them in for me as there's been a front panel in the most inconvenient our 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 but a regular board that you know goes inside a box and no one's ever going to see it 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 penalize your board and I talked about this on this morning's amp hour that I just recorded so 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 because 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 standard green with the copper on it that's just a beautiful color on it and um I can't find any manufacturing our faults with this board at all we'll take a look I'll get the macro lens out take a look in more detail there's a bottom of the flip side of that they've just got it alright we'll have a look at the via hole alignment and stuff like that let's go to the macro lens now the first thing you notice is that it this is clearly not a photo image of all overlay a component overlay white component overlay it's all our you know dot matrix 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 art board that's for sure this particular process so if you compare this which I got from our project PCB this is going to be my production panel the quality of that is you know even though it is are still that dot matrix our technique is not photo image of all it's still you know is much better than the PCB pool one unfortunately which didn't turn out that great so bit for prototypes yeah it's adequate really see any misalignment on those via holes ever so I think there are point four millimeter on a point eight millimeter pad not a problem and no problems on the really thin sliver of solder mask I think that's like fourth hour or something going through they're not an issue at all so these PCB poor PCBs are perfectly adequate for prototype stuff but the yeah the quality they're overlay does let them down significantly I think I'm not not entirely happy with that for prototypes fine wouldn't touch them for production though and a 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 that I didn't give me the stencil for the entire four board panel I'm not sure if that's at 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 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 squeegee apply my paste on those pads but then if I move it over to this one where it's just kind of ruined squish all the pace there so what I'm going to have to do is I break out the individual boards and just doing 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 disc as well so you can read this explaining how to do this and how to use the reflow oven controller now what I've done here is we're going to apply the solder place let's get right into it and basically this right angle board acts as a template so you just stick that down there like as a template retainer so you just stick that down in place like that and then your board which can just sit it and 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 squeegee 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 lined up but generally good enough by I like that and we only want to put one strip of tape along this edge here so that when we've done we were done with the squeegee 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 AM brand which are one of the top art brands in the industry no clean lead-free Tim based solder paste and it's important to get them no clean stuff it means it doesn't leave behind any crappy residue that you're going to clean up on your board as a post reflow process so that's really good anyway this is Type R NC to five four that's the model number sac 305 don't confuse it with the NC 2 5 4 which is you can get in a lead leaded version this is the lead-free stuff looks like we're going to fair bit left on the expiry date there this stuff datasheet says it has a shelf life of nine months if kept between four to ten degrees C or four months if left at room temperature but fit me and I just prototype around like you know where we're doing here you can probably keep this for twelve months at shelf temperature it's probably still going to be user you just mix it up a bit it's just that the you know the volatile chemicals inside this solder flux in there just you know over time just leak out or do whatever they're 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 grams worth it'll do it decent amount of stuff so this is what it looks like inside there we go hundred grams of solder paste tied asses they can't give you a full tub can they anyway this comes in various art type sizes from t3 to t4 t5 have smaller solder balls 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 solder balls that this particular one is and here's the datasheet which I'll link in down below and it extols the virtues of this wonderful solder paste abroad printing process window and reduces avoiding under micro BGA's 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 a 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 all your components down so that's really good when your hand a place and stuff there's all sorts of printing recommendations here look at this the squeegee precious stuff like that but you know when you're doing it by hand with your squeegee 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 squeegee machines you can actually set and program all this sort of pressure and stroke speed into your machine so you want to you know there's all different types of solder paces more on the market that you can focus to get and you have to set up your solder paste machine in production to match the exact type of type of solder paste you're using and there we go there's all sorts of you know the snap off distance of your stencil and in that separation distance are all sorts of stuff they really go to town on how to use this stuff and here's our all-important 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've got to keep your temperature at each particular time point somewhere with inside this window yeah it's very broad down here with the preheat kind of stuff doesn't really matter but once it gets up this critical region you know you've 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 were venting a toaster oven here for goodness sake but combine it with the reflow controller and we can get something that looks like one of these profiles they've 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 2:30 mark and as you saw on the oven this particular oven is 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 Sagan and she who must be obeyed Sagan was to come into play with the reflow oven he's more interested in the MakerBot than the reflow controller and there we go there's the micron sizes for the little balls for the different types there and you've got all the technical details you could possibly imagine surface insulation resistance and more sorts of stuff then you can poke a stick at look at tack test test results and stuff like that they've got various IPC standards for this sort of thing and well a surface mount reflow soldering is not easy folks it's almost rocket science and of course all these are thermal profiles these aren't you know absolute values these can change depending on your type of components your board and things like that because if you've got some real critical components European oh you've 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 stainless steel stencil just set there as a flap like that so as I said we can peel it off at the end and we shouldn't disturb I'll sold it now let's get our paste out we'll put a little bit on here you've got to mix it after you get it in and this can be tricky business we won't need much I 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 play around with that just give it a bit of a mix there better ways to mix it than this now if you're taking it out of the fridge you do want to let it cool down to the room sorry warm up to room temperature of it anyway let's take that now and let's give it a go shall we will start like that and just move across like that there we go we've 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 close-in look there's a oh it a five pads not absolutely perfect but certainly good enough and you can see the paste applied there's our SOT 23's now 1206 is 1206 as our man they're as big as houses so8 massive no problems there at all but there we go we should be able to and of course our little oh six oh three Sr that one down there is a bit of a bit of a loser but it'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 tie you can see if you're watching this in HD you can probably see the tiny little balls in that solar pace and there's that little slightly failed Oh 603 we just uh so8 over here you'll find that there's a soda mass between pads all right we'll place some parts I've got some five SOT 23 s here we'll use the SMD tweezers that came with it personally I don't like the hook type like this but each to their own we'll give it a go and hand place you don't have to get the alignment to spot-on now they're all upside down of course and don't forget the alignment to spot-on because the component will when the solder paste reflows will they will self Center into the pads and that's the beauty of SMD you just got to get them near enough and although it does vary with component well place our 1206 is here these are as I said 1206 as big as houses these things are absolutely enormous anyone who can't SMD solder using by hand using 1206 components really needs to get their eyes checked because Stevie Wonder could salt hand solder 1206 parts you want to give them just maybe a little push down there to get them onto the pads and well I'll finish the rest of them now would I care how good you claim to be Oh 603 starts getting down into the territory of being a little bit annoying for hand soldering and hand placement certainly when we're talking hand soldering I mean I can I think I you know I can sell 206 a3 is not a problem by hand without any without any magnification but then when you get to Oh 402 I find a really need magnification really helps but oh six a3 generally pretty done 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 a five and I'm going to stick to Oh 8 0 5 and s Oh packages and SOT 23 now I've got my re flow control logged up in series with the oven here and the soap lead is flashing there that means that the we haven't up plugged in our temperature sensor now with the thermocouple here we need a dummy board inside this chamber to I get the heat from now you'll be a similar material similar type to what you intend to solder so I've just got a standard 1.6 millimeter fr4 board here I've just thread the thermocouple wire through here just to give it some stability so it doesn't shake loose and then I've just of course you don't solder it in one of those holes I just stopped and I 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 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 up one a bit more in the center but there's actually not an exact center point in here but because I want to get some 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 full production you would want to put it in the center but I'm going to do it over here anyway it's hooked up it's got it coming out the door now this is you know just a kludge at the moment I might actually take the covers off this thing and see if I can feed in for a more permanent setup the thermocouple Pro through the inner wall or something like that and then have the board sort of you know semi parently set up in there now it's flashing the lone lead is now flashing that means that this box comes well a dumb it hasn't learned this oven so we've got to put it into low mode now and it will just heat up the oven and it will learn this is one one of the things I really like about this oven it'll like 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 look cooked up as well with the thermocouple now this thing should heat up here in learn mode should heat up the oven to a hundred degrees C so I can get a reference point and then stop so let's press the loon button and there we go it's on the lighter 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 it's quite dim oh it can see some smoke coming out so this thing is probably to be expected being used for the first time geez I hope it doesn't set off the smoke alarm here and the building that'd be embarrassing and my my Fluke thermocouple isn't exactly on the board so I expect some error there certainly no that's 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 going to be spot on there but yep that is done it's finished so now it's learned that it's not blinking anymore so now we should just be able to run the soldering process it should work a treat now you can see that the reflow LED is flashing here and what that indicates that inside the oven is still greater than 50 degrees Celsius and it won't let you start a new solder in process until the oven gets down below 50 degrees so that's one of the disadvantages with this thing is that you do have to wait if you're doing if you're doing boards you know big batches of boards in sort of you know a small-scale production process you've got to let the oven cool down to less than 50 degrees 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 because this could take some time to cool down and of course one of the reasons for the discrepancy on the fleu cup meter there is because the thermocouple of the fluke temperature probe there was just a sitting in free air so it didn't have like the thermal mass attached to the board like I've got for the other one in there so you'd expect the flute to actually go a bit higher than the hundred degrees C that the reflow art controller was expecting we're ready to 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 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 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 run this thing I'm trying to get a shot I've only got the Oh 805 s in shot here because I want to try and get the close-up 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 well hopefully this sucker is going to work here we go we're in our pre heater phase so this will take a bit and this is designed to heat up the board slowly and evenly so that things don't crack an the components so that things don't crack and do all sorts of nasty little mechanical issues so we start out with the preheat and then we'll go into the soaking phase which is designed to activate the flux inside the solder paste so that all the volatile chemicals inside the flux they all burn out and then you hit the reflow phase where that just picks it up and reflows that solder and then after that we've got the dwell time which is the the actual decay of the temperature so all these things by the way in this reflow controller all these all these various parameters they are settable 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 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 degrees and I can see that the element is are switching off and on it's switching the element off and I'm about once per second according to the blinking light on the front of the oven they're sort of odd maybe you know half second on half second off cycle time for that so temperatures slowly going up it's still only 125 degrees according to my fluke and there we go we're into the reflow process at well 153 it's saying according to my fluke there and according to the oven light inside the element continuously on now so we should see the temperature ramped 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 you know getting the regular toaster oven just switching on the elements and before you know baking your board this one at least has a modicum of control about it here we go you can see the soul - starting to melt and a couple of those the ones on the left hand side there they have almost three flowed 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 is switched into our dwell cycle and well we haven't had reflow of three of our resistors there I can't quite see the other components but I don't think they've fully refloat 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 no 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 ah it's terribly disappointed and it didn't really pull them in place very well either so this could be a fail folks so it's terribly disappointing and of course I'm not going to touch it it's still uh it's still quite warm in fact up these boards as I've said in previous video can retain their heat especially if they've got lots of our ground plain copper in them art this board doesn't but still it cannot retain heat for a significant amount of time but we have a fail I mean these components some of these components just have not reflow - I'll show you this one we take the board out but yeah what this is supposed to work out of the box and it doesn't disappoint it as you can see those sawed 23s haven't refried I mean some of the pins have there but that's pretty much well it's certainly a file um and the oh wait a Fire's as I said a couple of them have reef mode and they look okay the o6o threes of refloat not a problem there and the 1206 is not no only a couple of it refloat and l so8 hasn't refloat at all and i just noticed something very dharma I 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 and thermocouple and 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 don't trap your young players alright let me try that again I'm going to run through the loan process again and then run it through the complete art cycling and 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 die readjust it recalibrate it for any position inside your oven I you know I or in changing ovens and things like that I really quite like that that works really well and I started reflow solder and again sorry I can't get any video 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 are getting a shot for these things quite difficult but I can certainly see it by eye but yeah the camera is not that great all right we're in the soak phase now what we're looking for here is to at least on our fluke here for the internal temperature that oven to get at least to 200 and say 25 or degrees or thereabouts which puts it with inside of that reflow window there whoop and we're into the reflow process now and by the way this lead on the front does actually match the heater element so and that's on it means the heater elements on and the light on the front of the oven actually duplicates that so if we don't see this get to at least like 220 225 230 C then well something's you know out of whack because I'm assuming that my you know good fluke temperature probe is accurate and even the chart that comes with the beater a reflow kit you know it's showing a peak at 250 this is for it's supplied no clean lead-free solder paste so in this reflow process it says 2 degrees C per second ramped up and are we 2 degrees C per second or not quite anyway we're getting close to our temperature now so this is pretty good this looks like it's going to do the business 220 is close enough so I think where we're going to be in the ballpark and that board should have refloat it'd be nice if there was a light in there geez that'd be neat but it's still in the reflow phase so it's coming back down because it hasn't hasn't switched the heater on there for a bit but it you know it basically according to our solder paste our actual solder paste datasheet 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 right there we go up 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 refloat so I'm going to I'm going to claim that's you know near enough in terms of 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 but that's not the thermal mass that I remember this fluke temperature probe is actually I'm just hanging in free air in there so technically that actually should be a higher temperature than what the oven is but anyway that is done and he's done and dusted it is finished so what did the PCAT they're 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 thermocouple 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 we can go in and actually actually calibrate its temperature and up reprogram it into you there you go that looks like it's done the job we have a look there this seems to be some sort of like residual flux leftover or something like that so I don't know whether or not it's I mean surely it's fully activated I mean you get me you're not going to get the the solder reflow in unless that's fully activated but I don't know this particular type of paste offhand of what it looks like after it's a reflow but it barely got to temperature there 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 because I'm a bit 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 do it that way or it's built-in to the firmware in here and you can do it just do it like that and I'll show you how to do it I've got two other our thermocouples Agilent and fluke in there as you can see they're reading are slightly different soul just like split the difference or something temperature-wise I think I'll probably you know we're getting up to like just barely 220 before I'm going to set it maybe for 240 or thereabout alright so the way I do this is I press the lone button and as soon as the on/off button comes on a lid comes on I press the solder button and then it'll turn the oven on full power soon as these two reach up to 40 I press off and it should store the value in there so here we go learn and up solder there we go hello hello McFly it's not eating up hmm what's going on and looky here the two are thermometers are eventually 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 serial port onto here and actually check because it's got a command to check with the temperatures reading so if we go into 28 and to see if it that matches 28 Here I am in this serial console for this thing so if we type temp show we expect to see a look-see 36 degrees C its way out no wonder it's reading and no wonder this thing was under so this thing it came caliber you know out of the box was 36 degrees C that's hopeless it that was why our board didn't reflow properly it was too low in temperature because it thinks it's higher if it's you know if that was lower than they go over temp but it's not it's higher than what it actually is in there and well no wonder if we actually type the show all command it should give us all of the current parameters for this thing and you can see that's you know the preheat temperature preheat time preheat power so temperatures are all this stuff we can adjust manually if we want anyway what we want to do is because that's our 35 degrees it was 36 before and it's 28 in there we're basically out by 7 degrees and if we go temp offset then you can see that there's no offset programmed in but we can not temp what offset and we can put in minus 7 there we go we have now adjusted that and if we go temp showed it should give us 28 degrees there we go spot-on recalibrated 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 in my Agilent one well let's try this cheap-ass multimeter shall we see what it tells us hey 26 not too bad only one degree see resolution though all right I've let it all settle down and I've come back what the next day actually it's the next morning and 25 26 degrees C so it's pretty darn close and my fluke and my Agilent probes are bang on to within naught point 1 degree so I'm pretty confident with that so what I'm now going to do is ramp up the temperature in the learning mode and just see if the temperature at a higher temperature thermocouple in that matches the multimeter so let's give that a go got some Kapton tape there and I've got my edgelits thermocouple probe taped into a hole next to so they're both making contact in two 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 Agilent 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 edgelet meter here and the data logging 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 logging the temperature in lone mode so we should see it go up to a hundred degrees Celsius here because that's what learn mode does goes to 100 degrees at 4 as the ramp at times it and all that sort of stuff and 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 degrees in learn mode and switched it off and as you can see it is slowly starting to just ramp back down now cuz the elements off so there we go we can actually see the ramp on that thing and look at that it's a really nice curve I like that I just read the instructions for this up learn mode and what it does is it once it reaches a hundred degrees C it actually suite is off the element and then what it does is it continues to track you know and and learn how long how long it overshoots basically over that hundred and ten degrees or a hundred degrees Celsius so that's what's it's effectively learning there how much it overshoots when it switches the element off so there's a hundred where is it there's a hundred degrees 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 oh I've zoomed in there we go but so it and so it looks at that part of the curve there and now it knows how much it overshoots so I don't know it applies it to some sort of intelligent algorithm so it can now control the other and 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 because all we care about is what's actually on the meter so push the solder button and here we go okay so what I've done is I've set my reflow temperature to 230 degrees here I've actually programmed in that so we should expect to get a maximum of 230 degrees C on here so we're looking and I cannot log the data with the serial command here as well so I'll go what I'll do is I'll go temp show and then one second and what it does is it will every second it will just display new temperature there so we can keep that running and I'll start my login on the multimeter and on the login app and I'll press soda and away we go as you can see we've reached to 40 to 41 there even though it's set to 230 so we have you know as you know a significant amount of overshoot they're not dangerous by any stretch it's still within the you know the thermal reflow recommended art profile of this thing so that's not too bad actually especially given that you know this is a very small thermal mass board so I'd be tempted to actually leave it at that because you know like a components in my microcurrent for example our maximum recommended 250 degrees so it's certainly under that and when you put larger thermal mass boards in there you'd expect a slightly lower temp so I think that's a pretty much ideal now it's um it's still in the reflow stage and it's still got the heater switched on but what note there we go it's just switching off and on now and we're in to dwell mode now and we're continuing to log this thing but yeah I do I think that's that's pretty optimum it didn't and it's not overshoot into dangerous levels that's really all you care about and one of the real dangers of not having a proper reflow controller on your oven if you're just using the regular oven or 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 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 profile for the paste I mean you know there's no way our little pissant oven here can I ramp up that quick and be ramped down that quick as well I Marron talking a 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 refo Ivan can tango I really do like this controller it works quite well so I'm pretty happy with it very confident now with that thermal profile that the boards are working here will work and no doubt you'll see future videos on this where I assemble the microcurrent and other boards as well look it's Dakini sorry Australian joke so you can get by with just a regular hour of incentive 230 are doing timing you can do similar thermal profiles to this to make sure that works and stuff like that but I really like this arc controller I think is probably worth every cent there's lots of other controllers on the market too this open-source Hardware ones and things like that but yeah this is quite neat so pretty damn happy with this I'll make a little dedicated location for this and I've got myself a pretty useful thermal our reflow oven now which is you know pretty damn 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 because now a thermally profile it know exactly what it's at 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 you you

Channel: EEVblog

Views: 261,370

Keywords: beta layout, Surface-mount Technology, smd, thermal oven, reflow oven, thermal profile, calibration, lead free, solder paste, diy, how to, toaster oven, multimeter, agilent, bluetooth, data logging, sagan jones

Id: FNNRoXZom30

Length: 55min 27sec (3327 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 19 2013