LIDL (Parkside) B2 soldering iron hack and schematic

it's another revisit to the little soldering iron well Trilogy I guess since this is the third video I've looked at these units before the first video I showed how to hack it to get a more controlled temperature range the second video was showing how you could use the button on the front of the previous version to actually program the temperature by putting it into s calibration mode but when I did that I got a lot of messages saying they've released a new version It's the B2 and it's you can't do that and it's a simpler inside well this is a B2 version to the best of my knowledge and it took me a while to get it I finally found one in a little it was the last one the Shelf the box was open I checked everything was there and I wondered has it been returned as faulty and yes this button is not working on it so we'll have to fix it as well so let's do a test first when I clip this on because that button is jammed in it just starts pairing up straight away I don't know if this is going to affect its operation now but let's give this a test I'm going to light this heat up and then we'll see what temperature this is set at by default so uh that's assuming even works is it heating it is heating okay right now I'm going to pause till this has come up to temperature stabilized and then I'm going to use this uh thermometer for soldi irns to actually test it yes it's 12° C in here at the moment that's quite cozy and warm for my standards okay oh I can smell it heating up why while it's heating up I shall apply some soda onto the tip because you should always tin a fresh tip okie dokie right one moment please I'm just going to pause and uh wait for this to just uh stabilize it is now green which means it's come up to temperature but let's give it some time to stabilize and then we'll do the test one moment and we're back and as always with these it's running a very high temperature watch this the tip is kind of discoloring and if I put this on here I'd normally sold at about 360 to 300 well 350 to 360° C this is 480° celius It's heading for that's way too high uh I'm going to have to uh uncp this to the battery we're going to have to open this and explore it right that is now red hot I shall pause momentarily while that cools down one moment please the temperature has come down let's continue the video by taking this apart it's worth mentioning this base here has a soldier iron stand that Clips in and it's also got storage for bits it's quite nice oh and the little uh sponge thing but they're not that great so let's um take a look I get the feeling that the reason the button is sticking is possibly just a misalignment under the case I don't know if there's going to be anything really obvious we'll find once we've opened it up but to open up I'm probably going to have to remove that little Soder sponge base and the sticky label next to the button that's no great deal oh and this sticky button here which probably it's probably warnings or something it usually is this is my dangerously non-compliant modified vde screwdriver which is needed for getting into some narrow holes like this a normal VD screwdriver won't go in so the health and safety executive loves to uh seiz those screwdrivers that have been modified like that as being hideously dangerous and then you have to go and buy another one and cut it off again that's because the safety industry is very detached from reality let's see if we can pop this off can certainly shave bits of the aluminum off is it going to come off I'm not really too bothered by this it's not something I'd really use anyway it's stuck on but oh there there it goes oh was oh no it was clipped in actually I'm talking crap it could have come out very easily righty let's H just pretend that didn't didn't happen this I could have heated it up and peeled it off I may do that hold on I've got my suitable heated pen here hot air pen so generally speaking I'll just run over the label the label is not needed either so it'll probably be left off for the time I finish this but I'll you know go through the formalities of removing it in a nice manner by heating it up right that do oh a bit off there yeah that was pointless as well this is going so well how about now oh there is that sticky label at the back and it's off oh that is a much smaller circuit board so here is the the button works fine now it's off I think that was just misaligned it's a little tactile button there's the circuit board oh that is so tiny it's unbelievable right uh this unplugs but get the four connections to Soldier iron right to what I'll take a picture of this I shall reverse engineer it then we'll explore it and we'll see how easy is this to hack one moment please reverse engineering is complete let's explore and we'll start by looking at the back not much to see I didn't take this connector off cuz it's got these very big blade connectors I didn't want to melt the plastic or damage the circuit board because they're going into of Fairly large of ground planes and connect buses so I just left that on all that's on the back is basically uh these same ground planes and a few interconnecting tracks the bit we're interested in and I'll Zoom down this the bit we're interested in is this side that'll do actually good zoom uh the connections the soldier iron we've got the red is the positive the yellow is the switch negative via this mosfet and we get black and white that is the RTD device the resistance temperature detector and the good news is that it is hackable and even better news you don't need to even open the base you can literally do it all in the soldier iron itself as I'll show you later there's an interesting chip here uh it generates its own 5vt Supply it's got a regulator in it from the fuel supply voltage which is quite High uh it's like like say for instance it's 5 cells 4.2 volts fuel charges over 20 volts um other things worthy of there's the three connections brought on the negative the positive and the uh thermister and control pin um and after that we get a little connector for the interface board not really much more to say um I'll go cut straight to the schematic then cuz it is a very minimalist design I shall zoom in just a tiny bit more let's see if I can do this disastrously bad no that's good I did actually manage to do a controlled Zoom there here is the mystery chip now the chip number is where is it it looks like an M m29 a100 I typed that into Google absolutely nothing came up at all Google did not find anything like zero that's unusual so here are the battery connections at this end we've got the positive the negative and the uh temperature sensor plus the uh the controller inside the battery pack can actually disconnect this therer if it to actually say I am flat you know I've not got any charge left and it shuts the system down the positive goes straight over to the heat elet I've drawn it as a zigzag here there's a diode across that just presumably for inductive elements just to protect against uh the switch-off transients affecting the mosfet there is a little capacitor across the mosfet for Extra Protection and there's a sent resistor down here of 01 ohm which uh is to detect short circuits if it detects a massive current through the soldier iron it's detected via this 1K resistor to decouple it from the uh input a little uh filter capacitor and it will actually shut down if it detects an overload there's a little circuit board with the green red and led and the uh switch the push button and they're just got a common Zer volt and then it's just three outputs via resistors the resistor in series the button is just for protection of the inputs again it's quite a good design the supply goes via this 4.7 Ohm resistor which I think is pretty much a fuse really and it goes down to coupling capacitor here and then it goes straight into the device and that is the device's positive Supply but it also generates its own 5vt Supply in here um the temperature sensing is it looks a bit complicated but it's okay it starts off the 5vt supply going via a 499 ohm resistor to the the uh resistive temperature detector in the iron in the uh Soldier iron bit and then it's got another 499 Ohm resistor and the point of this is that this is permanently connected to 5 Vols which drops slightly when it's on standby um the current incidentally is 12 microamps in standby which is pretty good but when it wants to actually read the temperature that when it's active it uh pulls this pin here to the Zer volt rail to negative effectively and uh then it's got a potential divider that it measures from a tap on that via this 10K resistor for input protection a filter capacitor and then it goes to the input and that's how it measures the temperature we're doing a little hack we're basically popping a little resistor in here in the soldier iron itself um the thermister when it wants to measure the thermister in the battery pack or see if it's to enable in the first place it takes this pin here High that then forms a potential divider via this 10K the base value of 10K thermister which will vary up and down according to uh the actual temperature and then it's got this decoupling resistor here from the input and this of filter capacitor here and again when the uh battery pack wants to indicate that it's low on charge and it doesn't want a load pulled it can actually pretend that that's suddenly gone high temperature by disconnecting it and then the unit will actually see that voltage float up really high and it will actually shut off there is a mystery thing here I do not know what this is for when that goes High to actually activate that therm it also feeds this pin here via 180k resistor and a little decoupling capacitor I don't know if this is some internal voltage reference that's being activated I don't know or a comparator perhaps it might just be providing an input to a comparator I don't know cuz I can't find data on the chip it just seems this mystery resistor the other thing it monitors that 4.7 ohm fusible resistor uh it also monitors the voltage across the battery pack itself via a 2 meoh resistor and a 300K resistor down here there's a filled capacitor and then it goes to the input so it can actually monitor the voltage if the voltage is too low um it actually just flashes a code on the green LED but if the voltage was too low from the battery it would actually know that because it would already be getting the signal from this not sure why they do that I guess it's just maybe to check things are within tolerance um that is it I've literally described everything that was much faster than the actual reverse engineering okay here is the SOI iron and the module let's take a look at what I found inside I did rough a connection in the base unit from here coincidentally 52 ohm resistance called 182 ohms at its super duper perable hot setting uh so by adding a resistance here you can actually uh skew the way it reads it that's what I'm doing here so I put a little uh high value resistor in and then I've clamped my resistive substitution box across that now I have to say I think I screwed the readings up but just by having fairly long leads because uh it uh it didn't quite turn out as expected but I'll show you what happened there but it gave a rough indication that um 100 ohms uh gave a tip temperature of about 300° Cen once it had stabilized and 10 ohm 425 so I thought 33 ohm for the closest to what I'd normally use 370 ohm uh would be ideal but in reality I would suggest a 22 ohm and I'll show you how I put that in we'll get this out the way if you open up the iron while it's cold you can just slip these bits off and unscrew this cover then you can slide this out pushing the circuit board at the back I'll zoom out no I won't zoom out I'll just keep it as it is and if you look at the Circle board it's got four connections it's got the two red connections which are the heat element and it's got the two blue connections coming out going down to the black and the white which are the uh temperature sensing bit I added a resistor here see the resistor let me Zoom down this and I shall focus on that I added the resistor with of heat shrink sleeving over it I put a 33 Ohm resistor and to be honest I'd recommend a 22 Ohm resistor or if you want a spicier iron you could use a 10 Ohm resistor but all I did was take the white wire out cuz it was the longest it gave the most room to move put in the resistor uh put the sleeve over that wire sorted it on and then slipped over and uh heated up to shrink on that is the easiest hack now while we're here if you pull this back it shows that the actual iron the ceramic bit has these solder Connections in the side that's quite odd I want they'll probably very high temperature I'm guessing not sure um when if you ever do expose those make sure you put the sleeve right down and into the circuit board here because it has to go right down to uh allow it to go back into the housing to go back into the housing there is a little slot in here pull the cable at the back and it slides back in and you fumble around find that slot it drops down H this is where that would be sticking up too high if you hadn't sat it into the circuit board set this back on again put your chosen tip on noting that they don't have the little uh sleeve that some of them have which is better provides better thermal coupling pop it back on and that is your modification made and your iron has been tamed down okay let's Zoom back out again so that is it it's the simplest I've seen look at the size of the circuit board that is ridiculous it's so minimalist they've really cut it down as always it is set to this ridiculously high temperature to the point that it's going to really damage the bits you can see the discoloration there would have if you overheat the iron bits it just causes them to corrode at the end very quickly so it's better to tame them down but that is it and it's nice you don't have to open this bit because uh that turns out to be quite messy with all the labels and things coming off but there we have it uh the little which version It's a B2 iron it's uh quite easy to hack you just basically you can open the IR and with another Soldier IR keep in mind this is your traveling portable Soldier iron with the battery packs you'd probably have another iron at home I have to mention that cuz people will say well how am I supposed to Soldier it if I you know can't use the iron um but uh that um now now I've completely forgot we saying yeah so you uh can do the hack inside here um and without opening the base and that is a good thing because uh opening the base doesn't involve ripping all those labels off but there we have it uh it's a reasonable enough iron it works very well does the job um and as often with these little products it's very affordable just needs that little hack to make it perfect

Channel: bigclivedotcom

Views: 165,925

Keywords: lidl, parkside, cordless, 18v, 20v, soldering, iron

Id: TOfYLRxDW78

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 27 2023