Comment by ssl-3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ssl-3 | Hacker News Reader

Meh. Seriously.

Pros:

1. "Portable, sorta"

2. Reasonably high-power

3. Has an accelerometer (as does everything else in its class)

4. "Repairable"

Cons:

1. No Hall effect sensor to detect when iron is placed in holder

2. A walled single-source garden of soldering tips that doesn't even exist yet instead of using commodity COTS parts

3. The fucking temperature control is fucking paywalled behind a proprietary USB power bank. What in the fuck? (And no, it is not possible to create an argument that will persuade me to think that this is an improvement. (Yes, I know that it can be programmed; this changes nothing.))

4. Expensive.

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I'll just stick with my Pinecil iron. It gets all of these things right. If it breaks (I haven't broken a soldering iron yet in over three decades of trying), I'll fix it or buy another one.

I mean: For the $250 this iFixit product costs (including the paywalled temperature control), I will be able to buy several lifetimes of worth of Pinecil irons.

We considered having a sensor to detect when the cap is installed, but found that the accelerometer met that need. The default sleep timer is 30 seconds, but I set mine to 5 seconds and it works great.

All of the settings, including the temperature setting, are available in the web interface for free. The settings persist permanently on the iron so you can use it with any USB-C PD power source that you've already got. We worked hard to make sure that the iron works well standalone from the power station. https://www.ifixit.com/fixhub/console

I mean...

Here I am soldering in the field with my fancy microprocessor-controlled portable soldering iron. I've been using it with 63/37 and doing SMD work, but in front of me now I've got a big wire on a 1/4" TS plug to work on that was put together with lead-free solder and I simply need a higher temperature in order for anything to melt.

I never expected an audio tech in the US to use lead-free solder for anything, ever, but here I am anyway.

So now, I've got choices.

Do I find a computer to plug my soldering iron into so I can reprogram it?

Do I use the $170 temperature control (more than twice the cost of the iron itself) that I left on the bench for safe keeping?

Or do I see this situation in advance, and buy seemingly any other temperature-controlled portable soldering iron instead?

I'd like to have a temperature boost (e.g 50C) somehow at the absolute very least to even consider it an option.

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