Hackaday Links: November 17, 2024

A couple of weeks back, we covered an interesting method for prototyping PCBs using a modified CNC mill to 3D print solder onto a blank FR4 substrate. The video showing this process generated a lot…

A Brand-New Additive PCB Fab Technique?

Usually when we present a project on these pages, it’s pretty cut and dried — here’s what was done, these are the technologies used, this was the result. But sometimes we run acro…

Soldering, Up Close And Personal

A word of warning before watching this very cool video on soldering: it may make you greatly desire what appears to be a very, very expensive microscope. You’ve been warned. Granted, most peo…

Busted: Toilet Paper As Solder Wick

It didn’t take long for us to get an answer to the question nobody was asking: Can you use toilet paper as solder wick? And unsurprisingly, the answer is a resounding “No.” Confus…

Restoring A Vintage CGA Card With Homebrew HASL

Right off the bat, we’ll stipulate that what [Adrian] is doing in the video below isn’t actual hot air solder leveling. But we thought the results of his card-edge connector restoration…

Let Your Finger Do The Soldering With Solder Sustainer V2

Soldering is easy, as long as you have one hand to hold the iron, one to hold the solder, and another to hold the workpiece. For those of us not so equipped, there’s the new and improved Sold…

SMD Soldering, Without The Blobs

Hand soldering of surface mount components is a bread-and-butter task for anyone working with electronics in 2024. So many devices are simply no longer available in the older through-hole formats, …

Check Out These Amazing Self-Soldering Sleeves From World War II

Imagine you’re a commando, doing some big secret mission on the continent in the midst of World War II. You need to hook up some wires to your explosive charges, and time is of the essence. D…

Solder Two Boards At Once With This Dual Reflow Plate

Homebrew reflow projects generally follow a pretty simple formula: find a thrift shop toaster oven or hot plate, add a microcontroller and a means to turn the heating element on and off, and close …

Neat Soldering Station Design Has Workshop & Portable Versions

The warm and rather stinky heart of any hacker’s lair is the soldering station, where the PCB meets the metal (solder). A good soldering station lets you get on with the business of building …

Hackaday Prize 2023: One-Handed Soldering With The Solder Sustainer

For a lot of us, soldering has become so ingrained that it’s muscle memory. We know exactly when the iron is hot enough, how long to leave the tip in contact with the joint to heat it up, and…

Mechanical Pencil Solder Feeder Hack

Want a better way to feed solder, but want to do it on the quick and cheap? Well [ptkrf] has a solution for you in an old instructables post we stumbled upon recently. You might have, or can inexpe…

A Simple One-Handed Solder Feeder

Soldering can get frustrating when you’re working fast. It often feels like you don’t have enough hands, particularly on jobs where you need to keep feeding solder in a hurry. To solve …

Portable Soldering Station Runs On Drill Batteries

Power tool batteries are a convenient portable power supply for all manner of different things. [Zachary Goode] noticed that Ryobi was using them to power soldering irons, but no such tool existed …

LED Matrix Displays Get New Look Thanks To SMD Stencils

Even if surface-mount skills aren’t in your repertoire, chances are pretty good that most of us are at least familiar with SMD stencils. These paper-thin laser-cut steel sheets are a handy wa…

Finessing A Soldering Iron To Remove Large Connectors

One of the first tools that is added to a toolbox when working on electronics, perhaps besides a multimeter, is a soldering iron. From there, soldering tools can be added as needed such as a hot ai…

Phase Change Materials For Flexible And Strong Robots

Shape shifters have long been the stuff of speculative fiction, but researchers in China have developed a magnetoactive phase transitional matter (MPTM) that makes Odo slipping through an air vent …

PCB Hotplate Has Integrated Heating Element Traces

Normally when we talk about PCBs and hotplates, we’re talking about reflowing solder. In this build from [Arnov Sharma], though, the PCB itself is the hotplate! The idea was to create a compa…

How To Solder To Aluminum, Easily

[Ted Yapo] shared a method of easily and conveniently soldering to aluminum, which depends on a little prep work to end up only slightly more complex than soldering to copper. A typical way to make…

Acid-Damaged Game Boy Restored

The original Game Boy was the greatest selling handheld video game system of all time, only to be surpassed by one of its successors. It still retains the #2 position by a wide margin, but even so,…