Category: Soldering

Is A Genuine JBC Station Better Than A Clone? | Voltlog 401

If you are a subscriber of the channel you’ve seen me review this Best soldering station in Voltlog #340 This is a clone of a JBC station and I’ve been happily using this station for the past year as my daily driver. But is this very different in terms of performance or build quality from a genuine JBC station? In this video we’re going to answer that question because thanks to welectron.com I was able to acquire this JBC station for a 50% discount so if you are looking to get yourself a new soldering station please check them out, they have a pretty good offer, a link will be in the description below.

So as you can see these two have a fairly similar size & shape but upon comparing their weight I discovered the JBC original is 2.5KG while the Best station is 3KG. The soldering hand piece which is model T245A is fairly similar for both units if not identical, you don’t get the soft foam padding for the BEST but otherwise very much the same plastic, same silicone wire, same length. However as you may know, the handle piece from my BEST station failed at some point soon after I got it and I did an autopsy in Voltlog #387.

I’ve replaced the failed handle with a genuine JBC T245 which I got for like 20EUR from ebay as new old stock. So generally speaking while the two handle pieces are almost identical, you can expect lower quality control on something like the BEST and you might be unlucky enough to get a bad handle that will fail at some point like mine did. There is ofcourse a bunch of happy users who didn’t have this issue but the bottom-line is, there is no guarantee on the quality control.

IV-18 VFD Clock Kit Assembly | Votlog #388

Welcome to a new Voltlog, in this video I will show you how I assembled this VFD tube based clock, I like the looks of this clock very much it’s kind of steampunk type of style and because this is a kit, it’s widely accessible to anyone, you don’t need very specific tools to get this assembled and I believe anyone can put one together. As a bonus this clock, although it doesn’t include one in the kit, it can support connecting a GPS receiver for syncing the clock and on top of that you get a remote control so you can control it from a distance which is pretty neat if you ask me.

I got this particular kit from banggood and you’ll find a link in the description of the video if you are interested in getting one, I think it’s important to watch this video before you start the assembly because you might find some inadvertencies between the provided user manual and the actual kit that you receive.

This is what you will receive in the box and this is pretty much all needed for a functional clock, if you are missing the stuff shown here you might be unable to complete your clock build. Like I previously said the GPS module is optional but depending on where you live you might not get GPS reception in an apartment building for example so it might be useless to you anyway.

 

Best T245 JBC Clone Handle Teardown | Votlog #387

Welcome to this short Voltlog where I plan to take a look inside this JBC clone soldering iron handle. This is the handle that came with the Best-933B JBC clone station, I reviewed this in Voltlog #340 a year ago and I’ve been using this station as my main soldering tool for the past year. I plan to do a future video where I tell you my opinion about this station after 1 year of usage but the short story is obvious due to the fact that it’s my main soldering tool, I like using it.

The soldering handle that I received with this station had a problem since day one, first use, when I inserted the soldering tip into the handle I could kind of feel like there was something wrong, there wasn’t a clear stop when pushing it in and after powering on the station the screen was flickering, it couldn’t read the temperature and this cable got hot which is a good sign that something is shorted inside the handle.

I’m not sure if I am to blame because I might have pushed the tip too hard into the handle the first time. It’s also possible that it had a factory defect inside the handle.. Other users of this station don’t have this problem but long story short ever since I got it, I had to be really careful when switching tips because I needed to seat the tip very accurately in a certain position, otherwise it would short circuit causing the station to go crazy.

New Lab, New Voltlog Electronics Workbench | Voltlog #367

The most important part of this lab is obviously the workbench and this is something that I designed myself, I guess I can call this the Voltlog Workbench Design, it’s 2m wide with 80cm deep. The working surface comes out at about 95 cm from the floor. It sits on these adjustable feet but I haven’t even leveled it so far. Thanks to my friends at Welectron.com my working surface is protected with these nice premium ESD Mats. They are 100% and phthalates free, no bad smell, Heat and solder resistant, Chemical resistant, two layer ESD bottom side is conductive, top side is dissipative and they have this nice anti-reflective surface finish which is very comfortable to work on. I went with gray because it works best as a background for video shooting but you can opt for Blue as well. I’ll put a link to these in the description below, I highly recommend Welectron for their services & customer care and I highly recommend these ESD mats they are top quality.

Use These LEDs For Your Next Project – Voltlog #362

Welcome to a new Voltlog, this will be a rather short video where I will be talking about a rather common subject, LEDs. I’m sure everyone uses them in their projects but if you are like me you probably never cared about the efficiency of the LEDs you use for signaling the status of something on your microcontroller board. So what I was doing most of the time was picking the least expensive LED available while still picking a known manufacturer like Kingbright or Lite-on or Osram just to avoid quality issues. And that was my voltage rail indicator LED or my blinky LED for signaling some status. But this ofcourse meant I needed to drive those LEDs with a fairly high current of 15-20mA to get decent brightness out of them and that might be OK for numerous applications but in this video i want to talk about high efficiency LEDs and how your project could be nicer because of them.

ESP32 Aquarium Terrarium Controller – Voltlog #361

This project started when a friend of mine which has a snake terrarium asked for my help to build a system that is capable of regulating temperature and humidity so the snake can live in optimum conditions. I’m not necessarily a snake lover, I would rather stay away from these kinds of creatures but that doesn’t stop me from helping my friend.

I started by figuring out what he uses to control temperature and humidity and it turns out there is some sort of a lamp to provide heat from above, some sort of mains powered stone that heats up and a water fountain, probably one that runs with fog to control the humidity. All of these are mains powered and only need simple on/off control which makes things simple when designing the electronics board.

In terms of digital control I figured it would be nice to have to be able to update the set points and check on the status values wirelessly so I went with an ESP32 modules. This also helps to add an extra layer of protection to keep the user away from the dangerous mains voltages present on the relays. I can have the whole board, enclosed in a plastic box so the user never goes near the mains voltages.

Best Technique For Soldering & Inspecting BGA Chips – Voltlog #352

Welcome to a new Voltlog, in this video I’m gonna show you my method of soldering BGA chips because in the previous video where I showed the eMMC to microSD card adapter PCB I mentioned I don’t use any stencil for soldering the WFBGA153 package. I’m also gonna be showing you a method for easily checking if the BGA chip is soldered correctly or not.

So let’s start by talking about the BGA package that I used in this project, it’s the WFBGA153, this package has 153 lead-free balls, each is 0.3mm diameter and the pitch between balls is 0.5mm. Now the footprint that I used has 0.35mm pads for each of these balls, which means that when you consider the 0.5mm pitch, in between pads you are left with just 0.15mm which is roughly 6 mil, you basically can’t route any tracks in there using any of the standard PCB services.

eMMC Flash Memory To microSD Card Adapter – Voltlog #351

Welcome to a new Voltlog, today we’ll be talking about eMMC memory chips and how you can use them in your next project and whether or not they provide any advantage over a more traditional sd card.

So historically MMC memory was first and then SD memory cards were developed based on MMC specification but added new features. Both technologies are based on some form of flash memory and they both contain a controller in the same package with the memory. Electrically it’s the same interface for both in most cases however software-wise SD card ads some new features which are not supported in the MMC standard. While standard MMC comes in a card form similar to how SD memory cards are, eMMC stands for embedded MMC and it comes in a BGA package. 

The purpose of eMMC is to be used as non-volatile storage in embedded devices and almost all mobile phones and tablets used this form of flash for main storage up to 2016, when UFS started to become more popular.

 

Best BST-933B JBC Clone Soldering Station Review & Teardown | Voltlog #340

Soldering tools is a big subject as there is no electronics bench or hobby without a soldering iron hence why I have several videos on the subject and why I will continue to do such videos when new tools are presented. Everyone knows and probably wishes for a JCB or Metcal station since they are very well known in the industry, they are reliable and most importantly very capable soldering stations but their price tag keeps them out of reach for the average hobbyist.

That’s why clones of the big names appear on the market and they can be bought for half the price of the original one, sometimes even less. That’s why the KSGER T12 soldering stations are so popular and why I use them. They support the original Hakko tips and so they provide identical performance to a Hakko station as long as you install a good quality T12 tip.

Which brings us to the subject of this video, this is the Best 933B, which is a clone of the JBC CD-B series compact soldering station. This has been on the market for a while but I recently got a chance to review this station when banggood offered to send me one for free. I would appreciate it if you would check out the links I place in the description, this will ensure I can get more gear to review in the future. Price wise, if you were to order one of these it would cost you about half the price of the original JBC station. Depending on where you order the original one is around 400EUR while the Best station is about 200EUR on banggood.

 

T-962 Reflow Oven Custom Profile Calculator | Voltlog #339

In the last video I showed you how I upgraded the T-962 oven to fix some of the issues that were present on this oven. I also mentioned that there is an option to configure a custom reflow profile with this oven and that’s probably something you’re gonna have to use sooner or later because there are so many options of solder paste on the market and not only that but also there is variation between different ovens so it’s likely you’re gonna have to tweak that.

So in this video I’m gonna show you how to define a custom reflow profile in the open source unified engineering firmware.  Before doing any actual configuration on the oven you need to start with the specs of your solder paste. For this example let’s assume we are working with the NP545 series from Kester, we need the datasheet of this product to check out the recommended reflow profile. Inside the datasheet we can find the recommended graph, it’s an unusually small one for this paste but luckily we can zoom in and increase the size of the graph.

At this point I recommend you grab a screenshot of this profile and import it into your favorite img editing tool because we need to draw some lines on this graph to extract some values. First I added a scale on the Y axis with a line at each 5 points. Then I added these lines to plot the absolute values on the Y axis. So we now have a set of temperature values for every 30 seconds of the profile but the firmware on the oven, the procedure for inputting a custom reflow profile expects data points every 10 seconds so we need to somehow extrapolate our values to generate more points in between.