DIY Soldering Station

This project consisted of designing a soldering station based on the station from Elektor. To set my station apart from Elektor, I decided to make a custom display and use SMD components instead of THT in order to make the footprint of the PCB as small as possible.

PCB schematic and layout

I designed the full PCB using Altium Designer. My philosophy for the schematic was to break the "big" schematic of Elektor into five smaller schematics: ‘power in’, ‘thermocouple’, ‘power out’, ‘microcontroller’ and the ‘screen’. I also added test points to make hardware debugging easier.

Afterwards, it was a matter of assigning footprints and methodically placing all the components per schematic. Once they were placed, I interconnected the schematics together.

Custom Seven segment "Nixie tube"

For this seven segment display, I was inspired by Nixie tubes. However, as nixie tubes were impractical to implement, I found an alternative solution: LED filaments. LED filaments give the same feeling but are easier to power as they work on 3.3V. I than created my own seven segment displays with LED filaments with support for WS2812 protocol.

PCB error I encountered + solution

Once plugging the soldering station into 220V AC, a T4 (transistor) exploded. After measuring everything with the scope, I found out that the pins of the transistors were misconfigured. This got easily fixed as I just needed to rotate the transistors by 120 degrees counterclockwise.

Conclusion

This project ended up being successful. It allowed me to develop my abilities in understanding schematics, Altium Designer, and hardware debugging. I particularly enjoyed the process of designing and then seeing my ideas come to life.