7) Soldering + Tools for Beginners

Apply rosin-based solder to the part and melt it with the

soldering

iron. Well my job is done so I bought this at my local Surplus store and it is, and these things are absolute shit, uh, this is the problem, I'm not getting it. welder uh 30 Watts 120 Volts UL listed but seriously these things are absolute garbage if you only have a few dollars maybe you're just getting into this you're a kid you're working and you don't have much money saved from your job you know, pumping gas on your tank might be the way to go if you just want to get started and melt some solder and put together a kit, but if you're really looking to get involved I would really do it.

There are simply several good

soldering

irons on the market at a reasonable price and one of them is the Weller Wes 51 and it costs a little over 90 on Amazon. He is a good welder. I've probably had this one. I haven't had to replace anything in 15 or 16 years, not even the tips, they have a Wes d51 which is a digital version and has a seven segment display on the front that reads the temperature from the probe. I can't find that. that's necessary, but if you want to spend more, I think it's like 50 dollars for that one, it's actually 135 dollars.

If you want to pay more for peace of mind, I guess then do it. I can not find it. it's necessary, I've never had a problem with this, you said it and forget it, of course there are other models out there, there's the haco uh FX 888 which is 95 and the metcals, which I don't like very much, are like 260. dollars per the PS um 900 model and to be honest the metcals are basically tombstones that fall over all the time so I don't care about them so on the Weller stations you know you have your temperature control unit.

I have the temperature adjustment knob and the iron itself, so yeah, to change the tip of the welers, so it's pretty easy, just unscrew it, slide this guy on and then just take the tip out, replace it of course, do this when it's cold. Cheat a little and use pliers. I don't recommend it, but you can, if it's still hot, remove it and then pour it onto your sponge. It's pretty easy to use so I would obviously use this station for through hole and smt soldering. just for passive components and other small things, but if you want to make a BGA for example, or you want to make a qfn or qfp package you can probably get it, you can probably make some of them with a normal soldering iron if you're talented. enough, but for bgas you absolutely need to use a hot air station, so before we start soldering, I want to talk about other

tools

of the trade and the things you need.

You will need an ESD strap if you are working on any type. of grease or anything that has an insulated door due to static electricity because static electricity will destroy those devices, it's good to have an antistatic work surface that you can plug into and if you're in a dry climate they have conductive lotion because sometimes these straps just put them on, they won't make very good contact with your skin, put a little bit of that lotion on there and that drives a lot better, so the basic things you need to get started is a soldering iron if you go for that cheap one. or if you choose a really decent soldering station, you will need soldering.

Well, now solder comes in a few different compositions, so we have 60 40, which is typical. You know you would have found it at Radio Shack. You can get it. online very easily lead UH 60 10 and 40, and it turns out that it is a good magic combination to have a low melting point and work well with soldering this material to copper, so in addition to your standard 60 40 solder, it also It has lead-free solder. and that has a certain chemical composition. I can't remember it off the top of my head because I really hate working with it and it's obviously lead free, it's safer for the environment, the only problem is the melting temperature is much higher so it's a real hassle to work with again, you have to get a hot plate, throw your thing on there or use hot air and solder something that way.

I never use it for prototypes or even small runs. The things I'm doing for people are working. It's too complicated now there's a variation of this 60 40 solder and it's called eutectic solder and it's 63 percent 10 and 37 percent lead, it doesn't make any difference from what I've seen, it's not right, it transitions. solid to liquid and liquid to solid faster than the standard 60 40, but I mean, does that make a difference in anything I'm doing on my bench, so I don't bother with it? Another thing to note about soldering is that it has a The core in the center is a hollow core filled with rosin and which are basically acids from coniferous trees and allows for cleaning the surfaces while you are soldering, so it is inactive and It stays at room temperature, but as soon as you warm it enough, it will go away. to react with the metal oxides that have built up on the copper and your wires and basically chew them up good and allow the solder on the outside to flow and get wet and make good contact between your wire and your copper surface, there are some that I have Seen some smt components that were so corroded that flux wouldn't even help them, so make sure you have a nice clean board and some decent solders.

Brands that I recommend Kester. I don't even know what this is. aim solder.com aim solder.com is great anyway so another thing to keep in mind is the diameter, so for through hole components you normally need a wider diameter solder, this one has a diameter of 32,000 and for a surface mount I usually use twenty thousandths, so that's the basics. solder and it comes in different shapes this is a tube and it's still coiled in there you can just take it out that way you also have solder paste now this stuff has a shelf life and I've had it for probably a year so what's up?

Are there little balls of solder, just millions of them here and they're suspended in some kind of flux and they settle? If you can remix them, you might be able to do it. I've seen houses picked and placed, you know? they have some and they just stir it up and reuse it, but I don't know if you can do that with the syringe, so yeah, it comes like this, spray it on your pads, as good as gold, other types of flux. I used to use this all the time. Time is this chemical mg rosin core flow and it makes a giant mess, but if you want to have nice, clean, shiny joints, then it doesn't hurt to have this on hand and you can use a typical syringe, okay, and they have those syringe bottles, but after a while you hate yourself for buying it because you'll get flux all over yourself, that's good, now what happens when you have a giant sticky board and, the way my hands are right now, you want to get this shit off, so get yourself some of this.

It's a tech spray flux remover, there are some really nasty brands out there, this one isn't too bad but some will peel the paint off your face so get this. Some people use alcohol. I don't use it because it seems to leave the joints not as shiny, it leaves something like that, I don't know if it's residue or it interacts with the surface of the solder in some way, the other thing is these types, acid brushes, hair brushes of horse, whatever you want to call them, you can find them on eBay. I think God, I don't know, I paid like five dollars for this look, how many I got.

This is good for when you spray the board you can rub it to remove some of the flux but these bristles are too long in my opinion so you need to take some scissors or your cutters and cut them in half. I almost forgot about this guy. This is a resin flux pen from mg chemicals and I would always use syringes and it wasn't until I started doing research for this video that I actually started using one. We had some of these in laboratories and I never used them, but man, they are incredible. I'm kicking myself in the butt for not using them sooner, so you just squish them and that little tip retracts back down. and more flux will come out so I really recommend these now you're going to mess up so get yourself some solder braid okay this has flux everywhere apparently I had a leak this is the solder wick wick without lead, size number four and that's usually what I use for everything unless I have some really thick through hole trails and I'm trying to clear out a bunch of junk, they have some that are like twice as wide as this one I don't think that that's going to work.

It's not in the video but it's braided copper wire with flux again, you'll ruin it. Some people use wraparound wire, it's that solid core green wire and if you need to cut a trace on a PCB or a jumper from one place to another. another one, if you messed up your design, the mat, the magnetic cable, this is the magnetic cable, the wraparound cable is a good way to do it, but I use the magnetic cable because it's what I always have on hand and you know I'm used to use it. It's another thing, a good pair of cutters, there are millions of different types.

I prefer only the slightly angled ones. I don't even know what they're called, but Excellite is a really good brand that I've always used, so get yourself some of those. You're going to need grippers, of course, for the surface rug. You're definitely going to need pegs again with this, there are a million different types and you know what I always go for the straight pegs, they have the weird ones with the hooks that I don't even know why you would use that so we got our boards from Mosh Park and let's take a look at it.

I opened the package and took out the poop, of course I put the sticker on my white board. they all of course look pretty good, if anyone knows a way I guess I could just google it, but I always seem to have a problem with the eagle cat with the text running around the edge of the board or being too big or too small, I think it has something to do with the scale factor, but anyway that's a shame, oh but the board looks good. I'm going to go ahead and package these other two again and for those who haven't made a board yet or are doing so.

Sometimes I'm interested in, well, usually they have these mouse bites on the edges and basically you're going to have to crop them out and what I do is you know, I take my file and, uh, the first thing I do is I just remove the edges and crop to those guys. and then we'll file them nice and flat, no need. I just think it looks more professional and we just ran it back and forth a few times and it was like it was never there, wipe the dust off and there you go, now let's get started.

Look, I have my components set up and this is probably the simplest board I've ever made. We only have a 10K resistor for the pull-up. We have a 0.1 mic cap for bypass and our trusty. Select 8 bit 16f88 which I think the only difference between the 60 and the f-84 and the 88 is an internal oscillator so we will use that for this circuit and of course this is my step by step demo board step, I'm going to connect to a helicopter controller board from hobbycnc.com to make a stepper motor speed profile video very soon, so let's get those components out of the way and center my board on the camera, my iron It's getting hot. too hot, let's turn it down to 650 degrees and of course we need some water on our sponge to get my solder.

I'm going to use Radio Shack special 32,000 diameter, so I chose the 16f88 because I started with the 16f84 back in the day. the day I like the internal oscillator I don't particularly care, I mean, it's complicated to calculate the capacitor values ​​for an oscillator, the crystal oscillator and all that, another thing I didn't point out before was when I think Actually, I pointed it out, but when you store the solder, just put some solder in there and then put it back in the holder to store the tip. This nib I have is probably 15 years old now and is in Fairly Good condition.

I have all the same solders and tips I had when I bought the iron, so I always throw a little salt on it before turning the iron off or if you're going to leave it on the stand for a while. In the meantime, let's start with the basics of how to get this pup working, so I usually take the lowest profile components first, so I'll start with R1, this is our reset, and I'll take this guy out. from here and all you need to do is just bend the wire, put it in the hole, push it down of course, then you can apply a little bit of pressure to the board, bend the wires outwards and I like to trim them before you see. her because she ends up looking more professional and if that doesn't work for you, just solder it when they're long and, um, you can reflow it later to make it look nice.

I don't like how it looks cut off, so let's clean up our solder and you want to heat the joint and the pad for a few seconds, one two three, and then just slowly push it in and then release heat the pad, getting a little bit of a shine, heat it up. the pad and the lead feed. the solder works a little bit and I leave the iron there for a couple of seconds afterwards and then you have a nice clean solder joint with a little bit of flux in there, but we'll clean it up with the flux remover, okay?I think the highest profile component is the IC so let's go ahead and blow it up that pretty much stays on its own and these guys are pretty quick at cleaning my tip with the sponge and again I usually use a price for this but I'm not for this video just to make it easier to watch and with ICS I don't like to go overboard with the warm up and the pins next to each other.

I'll do a couple on this side and then I'll switch. on this end and if it helps you know you can tap the iron a little bit with the solder, this helps it flow a little faster and a little easier on this side. Have you ever seen the inside of an integrated circuit to which the external wires are connected? The dye inside through Bond wires and they are all next to each other. So when you hit pin after pin you are heating up that part of the die so that is a good idea. I mean, I don't think you'll really hurt it, but it's just a practice I do. make a couple on one side and then let that side of the die cool internally and then I'll travel down the other side and if you don't have enough solder you can tap it again so it's really easy it's nothing.

Really, to be intimidated you just need a little project like this, find yourself a kid online and you know, just do it, you'll learn the technique after a while and then it will be very easy, so I'm going to go ahead and put more solder on my soldering iron, keep it on my stand and let me see how close I can get because there is a lot of flux residue. I guess that's the closest I can get with this camera. Come on. I have a little problem here we go, so this side came out pretty clean, but there's a lot of flux residue here and I'll hit it with the flux spray and a brush in a minute, but let's keep it up, so the next thing I do.

What I'm going to do is the capacitor, so each chip has to have a bypass capacitor just to divert some of that noise to ground. Oh, we just have a small 0.1 microfarad capacitor here. Put that guy on the same thing. Push it through the wires I cut out. Well actually I'll only show you if you were to weld it before trimming it and I'm not sure what the exact way is as I learned with the J 001b standard. You would solder it like this. after and our QC guy was an absolute maniac so he didn't like seeing lead after we cut it out and you can see, I don't know if you can see, but I actually cut off some of the solder and it looks like Shit, so yeah you want to clean that up, just get yourself a flux container or a flux syringe and put a little bit of flux in there and just hit it again with your iron and then you'll have a nice shiny solder joint, okay, what's next?

So the next thing we have is these surface mount switches and those are going to be controlled. I haven't programmed them yet, but those are going to control, you know, set up homeschooling to teach the end point and move back and forth, and those will be. this one here. I haven't labeled it's function yet because like I said I haven't done the software or firmware yet so remove that and take it out, now they come with surface mount stuff, the best way to do it in my opinion is to God. that text really bothers me the best way to do it is to just take out my thin solder this is 20 thousandths so you can see the difference in the diameter a little bit thinner and I do most of everything with my um taper tip so I'll just put a little bit of solder in there, just a little bit, just enough to lock it in place and then come back later with flux to make it look nice and shiny, so it might help to solder underneath. a camera on this in this case, so I just heat up that pad, try to center it and that looks pretty good and then I'll go ahead and press both sides of the switch, flip it over, just press this side again. because there's flow inside, uh yeah, it's not good enough.

I want this to look nice, so hit it with some flux pencil. Flow again. Flow well again and we'll do the same for the next three, so to schedule this. We're going to use the 3. microchip select kit and we're going to connect it through an icsp header on our board so let's solder to that guy so it's always a good idea when you put an icsp port on it denotes pin one because it's a Bit annoying if you have to keep turning it back and forth and if you do a lot of boards it will be a real pain.

You're going to annoy a lot of people in this section. I'm not going to use a header, in fact I'm going to solder the wires directly to vdd ground and these are my step and direction TTL outputs, so you have the long side and the short side, obviously the long side connects to the programmer and the The shorter side goes to the PCB so let's just pop that guy in and these tend to wobble a little bit so tape them down or if you're doing a lot of production you might want to create a jig for it. just move the board back and forth until you feel like it's straight and you can tell from a side view if they're lined up or not, so let me move that thing back to where I think it should be and we'll tack.

On the one hand, let me go back to my thicker solder and I'm just going to put a little bit of solder on the iron to make it work. You don't want to go too crazy or leave the iron on these things too long because the plastic that holds these pins together tends to melt a little and you don't want to put on a giant mass. You don't want to put too little in because it can break down over time. You want a good filling, so not exactly. a 45 degree angle, you don't want an exact 45 degree angle between the board and your PIN, you want kind of a nice snaffle that's a nice concave edge all the way around, so that's basically it, it was pretty quick stuff. to assemble and our CSP header is now there so we can connect our pick 3 kit directly to the board and we should be ready now.

I just have to write some firmware, but before I do that we have a lot of flux here, so let's spray it, always do this with enough ventilation and these horse hair brushes of course come in handy. See the difference it gives a little more bite to the flux, so you'll see how When you rub it in there's a really nasty thick residue that builds up and what I end up doing is spraying the board on the edge of the table or over a trash can or something like that just to clean it all up, so I'll see if I can get a close up here after I finish taking off all this Gunk, so it's still a little wet but it's clean and shiny.

I don't know if I said this already, but some people use alcohol to clean their boards and alcohol. It leaves some kind of weird residue or something, maybe it interacts with the solder somehow, but I like to use a real flux remover, it just makes it look more professional and cleaner. Thanks for watching, click subscribe below, leave comments, give me a like if you enjoyed it. This soldering tutorial, the board shown in this video, is available on oshpark.com, just search the current source and all the projects you post will be shared there. Also check out thecurrentsource.com for tips on upcoming videos and lots of other quirky stuff. engineering things that have a good