Automatic Soldering On My Pick and Place! 

I love the idea, but from personal experience doing a toaster oven with a reflow controller is just easier. Awesome vid and project though!

It's a good idea, but an oven reflow is probably easier and while you are reflowing a board in the oven the pick and place could be doing the next lot of boards.

I personally also think a reflow oven is easier. But just because it's easier, does it mean sb/ should give up a interesting addition to this awesome project? I think it also has a lot of charme having one device "to do it all", while you drink a coffee or tea :D Maybe it would be also worth changing your "2.5"-way head to a 4-way head and having the heat gun as a optional setup for one of the heads.

Hot air on the pick'n'place is slightly bonkers, but also totally awesome! I like the idea of a single machine that can do everything because a hobbyist may not have lots of workspace. Obviously slower than separate stations for paste, components & reflowing.

Yeah that's probably the best move, plus it doesn't tie up your pick and place machine

I guess the idea is to create a machine that picks and places components and solders them to the board automatically, without you even thinking about it. The magic comes when the machine does everything.

Yes, a $5 toaster oven + PID temperature control is a simpler solution all in one go. The one with temperature profile could be done with Arduino, might take a week or two. If you created a oven for PCB. You may as well create a similar oven for roasting coffee bean.

I strongly agree. It takes what feels like 5-10 minutes for it to warm the area up enough to melt the paste. doing that for every component would take forever.

@@darkshadowsx5949 I assume it is easier to have this idea in mind the whole time and you can disable it at any time to use reflow.

Does it matter though? If you want to make say 50 boards over a week, that's an hour a board.

Me too me too

500 Watt with 40A is 12 volts... With 110V, the correct amperage is about 5A

@@AbdullahKahramanPhD he was considering a 12 V heatgun.

@@freundderuc9146 oops sorry

the bismuth solder is lead free, and melts at 138C. So I am using our regular convection/hot air oven in the kitchen. It heats up pretty fast that I can mimick a temperature profile by gradually increasing the set temperature, an I know that one temp is reached when the relais klicks. I am heating up gradually, and letting the board soak at 130C for a few minutes below reflowing the solder. Then reflow at 150C for a minute max. Then switch off, open the door a bit first, then full. At this temperature I could stay for ever with most parts, even MEMS sensors or LEDs. Most parts have a storage temperature of ~120C, some even higher! With convection I achieve an even heating of all parts, no matter if they are black or shiny in contrast to IR ovens, and I can control the temperature A LOT better with a heat gun. Also the heating is even and affects the entire board and all its copper and the parts equally, not spotty like with a heat gun which I consider crtitical particularly for parts with an exposed pad on the under side. With a heat gun you must transfer the heat through the IC, and also heat up the pad copper on the board, and maybe even the unserside copper when you have a lot of heat spreading vias. Thus you either burn the IC, or the paste under does not reflow. This together with a stencil which I now ALWAYS order with my layouts the results of the soldering are industrial grade. In addition applying solder with a stencil with a squegee, and baking the PCBs (you can do a whole batch) really speeds up your throughput.

What a Great idea

in fact it is the voltage drop across the resistor times the current running through the resistor.

This is interesting. I have an 80watt CO2 laser coming in this week. I got it for cutting thin wood but your idea piqued my interest. How would one go about using that for soldering?

@@spamspasm8183 The end of each pick and place cycle is the best time to zap the part. It will be relatively inefficient, but who cares, the laser soldering is the coolest gadget for diyers. If you go a step further into the sci-fi arena. Imagine you put a ATmega 2560 TQFP cpu on a piece of board, you feed a hair thin enamel wire to a leg of the ATmega, zap it with a laser. That will be real fun.

A kitchen stove, a pan and some sand works wonders too. You can even make Turkish coffee with the same setup LOL.

Putting the PCB onto a large metal will sink the heat away from the solder. Raising the PCB up and having the metal as a heat shield behind it would be a better solution.

Same exact thought I immediately had!

Yeah he said in a new post he's gonna ditch this method and switching to oven. It was obv not working.

@@JacopoFranco source?

The software that run the pnp machine is openpnp, its a java application and actually if you want to avoid to much pain, better to use it with a compatible Smoothieboard. using anything else instead of openpnp mean rewriting a 6 years old application. Not impossible but may be not worth.

And try low temp paste, bismuth based, chip quick etc.

oh just saw you switch to the hot air station, lol should have watched more... yeah those are much better

if not using a preheater, you can maybe move the gun around to preheat, I usually hot air the entire board for a few minutes from a distance moving around, them go in close to reflow parts, but that is a big board you have there

smart sockets for 5$ are pretty crappy. at the end u need a switch able to hold the Watts of the air gun = enough ampere. any decent relay can do that, add some circuitry to isolate optically the switch control from the main board and u are teorically safe.

@@riccardoz2953 Smart sockets for 5 USD can do 15 amps. As that is the standard fuse in a home, are you saying you change the entire wiring in your house? 15x220=3300 watts. What kind of crazy heat gun are you using that needs more than that?