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Reflow soldering hotplate

DIY hot plate based on ESP32 and a heater made from the PCB itself

vedranVedran
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An idea for DIY, ~60W, hot plate with wide input range (12 - 24V) and HMI based on OLED screen and rotary encoder with push button. Targeting reflow soldering for low-melting point solders (~140 °C), but can potentially go up to about 190 °C .

I've recently gotten into making PCBs at home and with that, came the need of mounting SMD components. Sure, I could suck it up and just hand solder those 5 boards a year I will probably be making, but where the fun in that? Instead, I wanted to get a hotplate to make the job easier.

Looking at the commercial ones, they are great, but not something I can justify purchasing considering the low volume I'm running with. However, internet offers a couple of pretty nice DIY solutions. Just here on hacakday, there's some really nice projects I got inspired by:

But as is the nature of DIY, you start with something someone else has done, and take it your way to accommodate your needs and most importantly, the parts you have available. So without any further ado, this is my version of DIY hotplate.

  • The what? and how?

    Vedran • 3 hours ago • 0 comments

    What?

    Before digging into a project, it's worth thinking about what this thing is and its basic building blocks. What does a hotplate as a product need to do its thing? 

    Well, the centerpiece is the heater, a resistive heating element. As the name implies, it's a relatively short piece of wire with low resistance that gets heated up as the current pass through. 

    Something then needs to supply the current to it. And something else switch the current on and off to control when we're heating and when cooling. This in principle is a working hotplate, you plug the power, turn the switch on and it heats up. Looking at when the solder paste on top of it melts is enough to know when to cut the power. (yes, yes there are heating profiles, but for the most parts...)

    However, we can get more fancy and add a temperature sensor to get real-time temperature feedback. If a smart device, say a microcontroller, reads that sensors and and can control the switch, we get a closed loop temperature-controlled hot plate. So fancy.

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Nikola Manolov wrote 4 hours ago • point

Uh i love this project. Is that an aluminium PCB you are using for the heater element? 

  Are you sure? yes | no

Vedran wrote 3 hours ago • point

Thanks, but I'll have to disappoint :D It's a regular PCB with a layer of kapton tape, glued to the aluminum block with some thermal paste

  Are you sure? yes | no

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