Having just done some soldering yesterday, may I say: I am a bit appalled at the idea of soldering irons having (or needing) firmware. Mine, I plug it in, it gets hot, and I solder things.
This firmware also controls tip temperature with a PID loop, whereas a classic 'dumb' temperature-controlled soldering iron might use a thermostat with on/off control.
I'd imagine on-off being perfectly fine for thermocouple-and-heater-in-tip, as you have very short feedback loop there
I don't yet have a use for Bluetooth, but I do have a few BLE buttons laying around (they're dirt cheap and last years on a single battery), and I can see e.g. having a dedicated button per temp (or perhaps to switch calibration profiles for different tips) could be useful if I did a lot of soldering.
It's minor stuff, not playing Doom while using motion controls. Hiding this kind of control in a proprietary dongle (i.e. the base) is much worse than it being programmable.
Background:
I’ve been trying to find something like that but everything I look at is Smart Home related and bigger than needed.
The smallest BLE button that I did find is part of a cheap China Gadget used to scroll tiktok/social media. Like this https://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Control-Photograph-Scrollin...
Unfortunately I couldn’t figure out if it’s hackable or not
I also have one of these because I get a lot of use out of newsblur and figured I'd support the maker (I don't actually recommend it because it's pricy and not very well supported... but it's functional and flexible): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/samuelclay/turn-touch-b...
The tiktok ring on the other hand manages to put a simple button, bluetooth, battery and usb port all into a package of roughly 6x10x4mm
Otherwise you can look at the Picoclick. It's 18x22m (height unknown) with no enclosure, with is 20.6x22.6mm and 11.6mm tall. Smaller than that is probably hard. I have never seen the Picoclick in stock, so you might have to build it yourself. It seems like a neat product, it's too bad the creator doesn't make it available.
It's only a matter of time before someone ports doom to a soldering iron.
Edit: Though to be fair, I think the popular ones already have open source firmware from the manufacturer but I may be mis-remembering.
Maybe these little portable irons are handy for the toolbox (I have a plug-in non temperature controlled Hexacon in my toolbox) but I'm not sure why someone would choose them for their bench iron, which seems to be what a bunch of attendees were suggesting they do with their USB/battery irons.
Seriously asking, what do these USB/battery irons do that's desirable?
Otherwise: what would USB change? Power is power. I like that I can plug my laptop charger into it, rather than needing yet another unique barrel jack supply.
Not necessarily a feature of only battery powered ones, but the more “high tech” irons have an advanced thermal sensing and regulation feedback loop that is aware of how much heat is being sunk into whatever the tip contacts with. This allows for easier soldering of many different thermal masses to heat up, e.g. if your circuit board has beefy traces for high currents without thermal reliefs, you will see some plug-and-play irons struggle heat it up in a reasonable time. If you are working with consistent trace sizes and thermal masses per joint, then you may not see a benefit.
An advantage of battery powered ones specifically (especially for new learners) is that you can eliminate the need for an cord that could be damaged by the user of the device in which it’s powering.
Proper irons have heat resistant cords, though!
Me either. I have both -- I have a very nice battery/usb-powered one that I keep in my portable electronics kit, and a mid-level bench iron for at-home work.
The bench iron simply works better in every way, and I'd never even consider using the portable one when I have the option of using a bench one.
That being said difference between one and good classical soldering station isn't that big.
> but I'm not sure why someone would choose them for their bench iron, which seems to be what a bunch of attendees were suggesting they do with their USB/battery irons.
Frankly because they are cheaper...
I don't have a benchtop I can use just for soldering, so my soldering toolkit lives in a box with all it needs. When I wanna do some work, I pick up the box, open it, and most of the stuff gets used directly out of it.
I put a silicone mat on a table, pull out the copper scrub and iron holder, and work on whatever pcb. When it's done, I can pack it all in the box and store it.
A TS80 is portable enough to fit in the box. A full on station would be a bit harder.
There must be some generational gap where older hackers are used to the mindset of having to buy industrial castoffs and fixing/refurbing to get something decent, whereas a lot of folks getting going now can buy something like the Pinecil and start out way ahead of the Rat Shack plug-in tip melters, heh.
Yes it has firmware, but I haven't had to mess with it yet in the two years of use.
I have multiple digital JBC soldering stations and the time from taking out the sleeping handle to having it heated to soldering temperature is so short you stop bothering even thinking about it.
And because the sensor is in the tips you can solder huge pads without the temperature of the tip going down enough to notice.
I am a guy who loves analog (in fact I build a lot of modular synthesizer stuff that is mostly analog computers), but in this case anything other than digital is silly, especially if you want your iron to do advanced things like extending the tips livetime by having a sleep mode that reacts to how often you took the tip out in the past minute etc.
It definitely works without a smart iron but if I could use bluetooth to set the right temperature automatically based on the printed material, why not?
Even though I’ll probably never set it up this way, it is still cool to be able to
Every one of these soldering irons has an MCU running the control loop.