Soldering on Colin O'Flynn

My 2003 Low Cost SMD Soldering Guide

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 12:03:46 +0000

Back in 2003, I wrote a guide for AVRFreaks.net about low-cost SMD soldering. I had never mirrored this to my website, but recently needed a more permanent link to it for a PCB introduction lecture.

The information may no longer be the most current (22+ years later!), but I wanted to keep an official mirror of it on my website. You can find it inline below:

MeatBag PnP - Simple Pick-n-Place

Wed, 29 Nov 2017 15:26:28 +0000

Have you ever hand-built a PCB prototype with lots of parts? If so you'll know the annoyance of hand-building something from a big stack of Digi-Key parts. Having to Ctrl-F the part value in the design, and dealing with hits on both top & bottom side. Instead I'm introducing Meat-Bag Pick-n-Place, which helps you the human meatbag become a PnP machine! Here's a photo of it running:

Low-Cost SMD Soldering Setup

Thu, 22 Oct 2015 20:06:04 +0000

The following blog post shows some details of my SMD soldering process. This was based on a larger video I did (linked below) showing the entire soldering process.

Video of Soldering Setup

The following shows me soldering a complete board with BGA device.

Equipment Used

In the above video, there are several pieces of equipment used. The following shows you some of the important ones.

Reflow Oven

I'm using a T962A reflow oven. I recommend this over the T962, which is a smaller version. The T962A has 3 heat lamps so has a more even heat distribution. Be aware you can't use the full surface area - about the middle half I find is successful, but depends a little on complexity of the PCB.

I specifically purchased mine from this seller on AliExpress, check other sellers as prices change over time. You might turn it on quickly to confirm it works, but before doing much there are some important fixes:

Removing masking tape, replace with Kapton (Polymide) tape. See instructables post for details.

Fixing missing ground connections. Some versions have poor grounding between the outer (metal!) case and the wall plug. See the wiki page for a photo of this fix.

Updating the firmware and adding a cold-junction sensor. This is the most complex task, and requires soldering a DS18B20 to the mainboard, then using a USB-Serial adapter to reflash the firmware. See the front page of the T962-Improvements Github Repo, which has links to the required soldering. There is also an optional fix to reduce the very noisy small fan.

Fume Hood

I built a fume hood out of the following:

2x4's for frame.

Thick plastic drop-sheet.

Powerful vent booster fan with variable speed control.

Active charcoal oven range hood filter (mounted in top of fume hood).

Active charcoal filter for car cabin (mounted in cardboard box used as exhaust).

You can also improve one out of a range hood from an oven. See video for general fume hood construction.

Manual Pick-n-Place

This requires three things:

Vacuum pump, which you can make from a Tetra Whisper pump (see instructables link). Get some of the nice silicon tubing at the same time (like $3 from Amazon).

Syringe with hole drilled into body. You can get syringes (don't need the pointy bit!) from pharmacy, or order from Newark/Digikey. When you cover the hole, you force the vacuum through the tip, picking up the part. Release your finger from the hole to drop the part. See the above video for details.

The tips for pick and place, which are "Luer Lock" needles bent slightly (for small parts) or commercially available tips (for larger parts).

The tips are the only somewhat tricky thing. I had a good selection from a previous SMD picker tool, something like this kit for example (which is Chip Quick Inc. part #V8910). These tips are actually the same "Luer Lock" that fits into syringes, check E-Bay for cheaper kits:

SMD Solder Paste Stencil Creation with Silhouette Cameo

Fri, 21 Nov 2014 01:03:00 +0000

I made some additional details in a long YouTube movie:

This is far from the first blog post on this, but I wanted to write down exactly what I did to get this working on Windows 7, 64-bit with as little fussing as possible.

1. Buy Silhouette Cameo [NOTE: The v1 I used is no longer available. I've heard the V2 with latest firmware does work OK]

2. Decide on material. I originally used the Transparency Film but it's a little thick, so instead ended up finding that you can buy 3 Mil drafting file individually from art stores.