{"id":2490,"date":"2016-09-05T20:57:42","date_gmt":"2016-09-06T03:57:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digitalnigel.com\/wordpress\/?p=2490"},"modified":"2016-09-05T20:57:42","modified_gmt":"2016-09-06T03:57:42","slug":"surface-mount-toaster-oven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitalnigel.com\/wordpress\/?p=2490","title":{"rendered":"Surface Mount Toaster Oven"},"content":{"rendered":"

As part of my continued work on my Homebrew GPSDO<\/a>, I’ve been working on a new circuit board design to both add new functionality, improve existing functionality, and consolidate a bunch of the parts in the last revision, onto a single board.<\/p>\n

It’s a reasonably sized board at 2.5″ x 4″, with some fairly tight pitched components (TQFP-100). While I’ve soldered those sorts of components by hand before, I felt like this would be a good opportunity to up the game a bit. So, instead of soldering the board by hand, I decided that I would paste the boards (with a syringe, not a stencil), and place the whole board in an oven for reflow, which would solder all the parts at once.
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

\"IMG_4515\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I applied the paste by hand, and then placed each of the components on top of the footprints. The paste is tacky enough to hold the parts in place, and I worked from the upper left to the bottom right to avoid bumping any components I’ve already placed.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_4516\"<\/a><\/p>\n

My reflow oven is a cheap toaster oven, and a thermocouple I monitor on my multimeter. Not advanced by any standard, but it works. I may consider making some sort of controller to manage the oven for me, instead of having to control it manually.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_4517\"<\/a> Looking in the front glass with a flashlight, I can look at how the solder is flowing. Combined with the temperature reading from the thermocouple, I know when it’s all finished.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_4519\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And out pops a nicely soldered board! I soldered the pinned components manually afterward, and did some cleanup of the finer pitched components with solder braid, as when I was manually dispersing paste, I put too much down. A stencil would help there. Plus, no board would be complete without the obligatory bodge wire. While not strictly necessary, this particular bodge makes it much easier to program the microcontroller.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As part of my continued work on my Homebrew GPSDO, I’ve been working on a new circuit board design to both add new functionality, improve existing functionality, and consolidate a bunch of the parts in the last revision, onto a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,10,20,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-electronics","category-ham-radio","category-projects","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalnigel.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalnigel.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalnigel.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalnigel.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalnigel.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2490"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/digitalnigel.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2497,"href":"https:\/\/digitalnigel.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2490\/revisions\/2497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalnigel.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalnigel.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalnigel.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}