Watch this week’s video and discover the Elektor T-962 V2.0 Reflow Oven, a good tool to upgrade the SMT soldering ...

With reflow soldering, sometimes close is good enough. At the end of the day, the home gamer really just needs a hot plate or an old toaster oven and a calibrated Mark I eyeball to get decent results.

He studied the reflow profile of the solder he would be using, programming the microcontroller to regulate the heating/cooling process without requiring any user input, aside from turning the oven on.

Toaster Ovens have been used for years to reflow solder paste on DIY PCBs, but Reflowster aims at making the process easy, repeatable, and cheap!

The customer wanted to use AOI after placement and before the oven to identify defects earlier in the process (Figure 1). Figure 1. Block Diagram Showing Process Steps Without and With AOI ...

Other methods are typically performed within a chamber (oven) using different forms of heat transfer, including convection, infrared, and vapor phase. Reflow ovens come with up to five heating zones.