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Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

Mine, I plug it in, it gets hot, I solder things. I put it down, it starts cooling immediately. I pick it up, it's hot again in ~2 seconds. I need more oomph for a bigger component, I push a button and it jumps to my second pre-set temperature. It'll go back to my main temp if I put it down again to grab the next component.

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.

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Additionally, the firmware is going to be handling temperature control, in this case with a PID loop. This results in more consistent and precise temperature at the iron tip whether you're working with a small component or a larger one which is sinking a ton of heat, which is always a good thing.

Got a link for those buttons?

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've just held onto random ones I've run across, e.g. itags have been reasonably popular for a while: https://devices.esphome.io/devices/ble_itag and during BLE / IoT bursts of hype random things are sometimes handed out for free at and around events (not often programmable, but that's usually fine - they broadcast a unique ID when powered / when pressed, that's all you really need).

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...

IKEA has or had a ZigBee button. It's tiny and comes in black or white.

That one still seems to be 45x45mm. I am now using Philips hue smart buttons which are similar in size.

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

IKEA Symfonisk is 50mm round but it has press and rotate. I was actually thinking of Aqara WXKG11LM. It's 45mm square with round corners, but only 12mm thick.

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 minor stuff, not playing Doom while using motion controls.

It's only a matter of time before someone ports doom to a soldering iron.

in a way, this has already been done! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCC941xKuBs

My JBC has a lesser temp (like 150C) that it holds for a little while when returned to the stand. This is supposed to extend tip life. The heating element is in the tip, so the tips are spendy.

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