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“This project was waiting on a box fot two years, until I had to solder 100 PCBs. After some research on SMD/SMT reflow oven hacking, I was confident to build my own reflow device with an halogen floodlight. First test was to check the speed of the temperature rise inside a standard halogen floodlight. Reflow soldering temperature curves are quite demanding, and some adapted ovens can’t reach the degrees-per-second speed of the ramp-up stages of these curves. I bought the spotlight, put an aluminium sheet covering the inside surface of the protective glass (to reduce heat loss), and measured the temperature rise with a multimeter’s thermometer…. and wow! More than 5ºC/s… and I better turned the thing off after reaching 300ºC and still rising quickly. So the floodlight was able to fulfill the needs. Next step was a temperature controller, that is, the device that keeps the temperature as in a specified reflow curve profile in each moment. Having an AC heater element (in my case the halogen bulb), the two basic components in a AC temperature controller are: a temperature sensor; an AC dimmer (connected to the heater element).”

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