SDG #268 New MiniWare TS101 - Upgraded from TS100 USB Soldering Iron test with PCBs from JLCPCB

Hello, today we will be looking at the new

miniware

ts101

soldering

iron

, so this is the update to the very popular ts-100 Soldier 9 and there are some improvements to this one, firstly it has a new slightly different form factor. in design over the previous version, but the most notable improvements are that we have a much larger screen on this one, we also have two power supplies, a USBC and a DC connector, and the USBC connector supports power delivery from 9 to 20. volts giving a maximum output of 45 watts on one of the prongs, but you can also supply it with a DC input on the 9 to 24 volts DC connector and that gives you a maximum of 65 watts on all 9 prongs of the soldier, which is enough. competing now with some of the much larger Soldier lines and Soldier

iron

stations, so it would be interesting to see how it performs today.

Looking a little closer at the unit, this is our new slightly larger 128 by 32 pixel OLED form factor and when we turn it on you can see that the screen is quite clear so it has a very familiar user interface to those who have used the

miniware

devices before we can go through the menu, so we have several presets, so three presets that allow you to quickly switch between temperature profiles, we have the step size if you want to manually adjust the temperature to go up in 10 degree steps, but you can change the sleep temperature so that after a certain period of time it goes down to a slightly lower temperature to avoid oxidizing the tips at the time it is set to 180 seconds, then we have downtime, which is the amount of time before you physically turn off the heater completely.

Backlight which is actually the OLED brightness and we have the units. uh direction of the screen, so if you're left-handed you can rotate the screen uh increase the temperature, something I don't necessarily agree with, but that's if you need to deliver a little extra power to overcome the thermal limitations of soldier 9, What your power supply is a minimum voltage free lithium polymer cell, so if you are using lipo cells and you can set the low voltage lock type to prevent you from draining the batteries below a certain amount of things like maximum PD, this is our maximum power delivery power. remove from the USBC connector uh sensing units calibration and reset to factory defaults, so it's a pretty standard interface compared to the ts-100.

Now when we want to attach a tip, we just slide it in here and there's a retaining screw that just gives it a little bit of a turn, don't try to tighten it too much, but that just retains the tip in the

soldering

iron and then we're ready to go, but there's a Additional accessory that comes with this new unit. It's supposed to be some kind of In fact, I think you have to put it on first, this is to try to prevent you from accidentally slipping on the tip of Soldier 9, so it has a little ridge here that just keeps it from sliding in. , but it would have been good.

If that were molded instead of having that rather rough feeling between the handpiece and the guard, the unit is now quite compact and actually quite light. The main part of the body is about 100 millimeters long, but the tips are also quite long, so it sticks out. about 65 maybe 66 millimeters from drive to tip, which means you're holding soldier 9 pretty far from the soldier joint you're trying to do if you compare it to one of the metcal soldier knives um that you can Look, There is a significant difference between the distance between the tip and the fingers. That might not be a problem for experienced people or people who don't have any problems with hand-eye coordination, but a little finger movement here results in a pretty big difference. motion here so that means you're potentially a little bit more inaccurate with your soldering with that long distance so our sponsor provided us with these PCBs for today's jlc PCB video and these are some matte black PCBs with a gold finish from immersion. and these PCBs will allow us to compare different Soldier ions and see how they perform when soldering some through-hole parts.

You can now get your own PCBs manufactured at JLC ​​PCB for just two dollars for five PCBs up to 100 by 100 millimeters in a variety of different PCB colors and thicknesses, so don't forget to visit jlc PCB if you're thinking about manufacturing some boards, that It was the tapered tip, so let's try a chisel tip. We can see that it maxes out at about 35 watts and you can see the input voltage of the power supply AC adapter is 20 volts and we are set to 330 degrees C, so according to the instruction book, We can also power this with a DC adapter, so I have a 24 volt DC adapter here that should allow this. to run anywhere up to 65 Watts so let's try to turn this on and if you look up here we have the instantaneous power so let's start warming up and we'll get around 45 Watts instead of slightly less power than that so we're not going to go up to 65, but that's definitely an increase in power.

Let's try putting some solder on one of these gold pads. It's just a double layer PCB with no thermal virus, so this should be pretty straight forward. We are ready to do it. At 350 degrees C it flows fairly easily but there is a bit of resistance compared to some of the other soldering stations but it seems to melt the solder pretty well on that big gold pad and most of the pad actually stays melted there . As you can see, let's compare that to the CV metcal system and we'll start heating it up, but as you can see, we can discharge the solder super fast here, almost 90 watts on that platform, which is why it melts so much. quickly with that CV system again, just dump the power and it will actually distribute the weld very easily, without any effort with a much more powerful station, but these small and compact Soldier lines are obviously not designed to compete with a very expensive metal. foreign station, so overall I think it's a really good Soldier line, it works very well, but in my opinion I think it's more geared towards portable soldering than tabletop use, so due to the various power options, I mean it has a lot of flexibility. here we can power it from a phone charger, we can power it from a USBC power bank, we compare it with a DC adapter, you can power it from your car, you can power it from a battery and there are a wide variety of power options, which means that you can take this anywhere you need to do some soldering and you will be able to get very good soldering results, but a few things I don't like, first of all, it doesn't come with any type of stand, although this finger guard actually prevents It doesn't move around on the bench which is a big improvement over the ts80 I reviewed previously so it actually stops it from going anywhere and I think if you had a silicone mat to put underneath that works pretty well but nothing is provided with it and anyway I would prefer some sort of soldering holder 9 that you can just attach it between the solder joints or when you're done soldering just to reduce the risk of burns, also as I pointed out there is a slight limitation on the distance between the tip and where you hold it, for beginners in particular this can create some difficulties in soldering accurately as you gain more experience, you won't find it too problematic, but if this could be reduced it would really make This would be a much more attractive proposal and would reduce the size of the thing.

I mean, you can weld in even tighter spaces. The user interface works quite well, you need to get a little used to it. Which button does what? but after a short period of time it makes sense and overall I think it's pretty good, I'll certainly take it with me if I ever need to do any repair work, but on my bench I think I'll keep doing it. a normal soldering station just because it is designed for benchtop use. I will put a link in the description below if you are interested in taking a look at this item and if you already own the

ts100

the tips are compatible with it so if you wanted to upgrade you don't have to buy a whole new set of tips, which is pretty good, but if you have any ideas or comments, don't forget to leave them in the comments section below, thank you very much. our sponsor jlc PCB don't forget to visit them if you want to make some PCBs and until next time thanks for watching.