Hot air soldering gun
I decided to build a hot air soldering gun after all attempts to build a kind-of-working roflow oven.
Reasons
- Simple construction (?!)
- Easy handling
- Better for the purpose I want to use it for
I saw an inspiring post on Hack a day here; which made me creative. The whole thing should be cheaper than an Ayoue (?) hot air soldering station (~85€).
And that’s what came about:
- 400W ATX-Power supply with 18A on the 12V-rail(ebay 10€)
- DIY controller with 4 PWM channels (Atmega644 @ 20MHz, 4 Ch PWM Controller with ~20A per channel, 2 * MAX6675)
- DIY heating Element (up to 500°C [!!])
- Aquarium air pump bis 4l/min (Aquaristics-Shop (ouch) 25€)
- PID-controlled temperature (ca. +- 1°C)
- -> Expandable via I²C
Action-videos will follow soon!
Updates
- I work on a new heating element – completely made of glass this time…
Source & Layout:
- Sourcecode – undocumented & without any warranty (Licence see header of file) V 1.0 beta
- Eagle Layout (Rev. 2 with bugfixes – untested) CC-BY-SA 3.0
Now; see for yourself!
Max6675 debugging at its best…
Programming & Debugging united…
The controller was mounted on the power supply and wired up…
The heating element. It consists of ~10cm resistive wire (~ 1 Ohm) inside a
standard glass tube. Simple but efficient!
Front of the heating element (output), right: Thermocouple; yellow is the
silicone-insulation of the -end of the resistive wire. The silocone-tubing, which transports
the hot air to the output nozzle is lacerated; this is still a problem (silicone doesn’t work with 500°C !)
Further detail of the heating element, the GFK-holder is burned, it is already replaced by an
aluminium one.
This is how 500°C looks like on GFK…
…
The heating element with cable harness
Whithout words (for DIY-cred… 
)
The heating element in its case, and the airpump. MSP430 Launchpad to scale.
Output nozzle; still with GFK-spacers
The controller inside a nice casing and CNC-milled front (and back) plate.
The two DIN-connectors on the right are extension connectors.
With a connected hot air gun… (air is supported seperately)
Sure, the case is retro, but hey!
Backside, also with milled plate.