The VHS reflow oven has seen lots of use in many SMD soldering workshops, group builds and by individual members assembling their own boards.
Why Upgrade?
Increased ease of use with colour touchscreen, improved hardware, and ability to have multiple heat profiles which will allow having lead-free solder and lead solder as two different profiles.
Whizoo has come out with version 3 of their controller which has many additions to our existing controller.
A quick summary of the improvements over Controlleo2
Giant leap forward to Controleo3
Controleo3 was designed to address ControLeo2’s shortcomings, and extend the controller’s capabilities far into the future. It retains ControLeo2’s strengths like ease-of-use, flexibility and openness but dramatically increases performance and useability.
4" 480 x 320 color touchscreen
Processor is 12 times faster
10 times more memory and 40 times the storage
Supports 6 outputs (up from 4)
Support for up to 28 profiles
PID support, with intelligent tuning
SD card support for log files (coming soon), screenshots and reflow profiles
Upgraded thermocouple IC has line-voltage filtering
Hardware is more robust (dare we say idiot-proof?)
Woo! Thank you for doing this. Happy to throw in 20bux. Also thanks to the amazing @packetbob for building the original and helping us with this upgrade.
Worth discussing in #electrical on slack. There are some downfalls to the IR one that Brian is donating (thanks Brian - for donating!)…but we can defo make use of it and it could be improved with some hacking. Overall I think we still want to upgrade the in-house one and also hack Brian’s (which he is okay with). We could definitely make use of 2 ovens. Just my 2 cents.
Edit: @Majicj also has some info on the capabilities of the donated one and why we should still upgrade the existing oven.
For sure - I think we’ll find we still want to upgrade the current one even just to have 2 ovens capable of doing unleaded at the same time. Would be great for SMD workshops.
The controller has been ordered and is on it’s way.
Just to be clear. There has been a donation of a reflow oven by @brianzhouzc for which we are thankful for. Having a second oven will be great for workshops as there is the cool down time between baking boards that slows things down.
If anyone prefers not to donate then no worries. Just let me know and I will adjust the figures below.
I have taken the VHS SMD Reflow Oven to my place to retrofit the new controller that @Majicj got with the donations…
I have left my own oven at the Space in the event someone needs to reflow solder while I`m working on the upgrade…
Its the same as the VHS model…
I do have the temperature cranked up a bit higher than normal for leaded solder as it seemed to work better for some larger boards I was doing…