Any plans to make a hot tweezer tip for this? It's hard to come by those for a reasonable price and that would be very appealing since I've often found myself needing to desolder surface-mount components.
I was initially skeptical about the cap vs. a traditional stand until I saw that it mounts to the side of the battery pack to double as a stand. I like that idea!
Also, is there documentation on the serial protocol used in case someone wanted to write a temperature control program that didn't rely on a webapp?
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 powe…
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
Looks much like the pinecil [0] (which I love btw if I have no acess to decent equipment) but with Webinterface ?!? Love the look though. [0] https://pine64.com/product/pinecil-smart-mini-portable-solde...
Pinecil can not deliver actual 100w, and most chinese type-c handles can neither. This one uses real buck converter which can help with this problem.
Pinecil V2 is specified to be 88w -- less than 100, but not very far off.
And with a (simple) firmware change and the appropriate 28v EPR charger, it can do 140w.
Looks much like the pinecil [0] (which I love btw if I have no acess to decent equipment) but with Webinterface ?!? Love the look though. [0] https://pine64.com/product/pinecil-smart-mini-portable-solde...
Pinecil can not deliver actual 100w, and most chinese type-c handles can neither. This one uses real buck converter which can help with this problem.
Is the reason a buck converter is required so that it can increase I? I = V/R, by increasing V we can increase I?
Overall a great idea, though not a fan that you can’t directly change the temperature on the soldering iron without the power station.
You can set the temperature on the iron with our web console, which uses Web Serial: https://www.ifixit.com/fixhub/console Once you set the temperature, the iron remembers it and you can use any power source. We've spent a lot of time talking to engineers and makers who solder all day, and it turns out that most people rarely change the temperature. Pick a temperature you like and leave it there. Our heating algorith…
I definitely can see that, I rarely change my solder iron temp too but the biggest issue is that I purposely do not keep my phone or laptop within reach where I solder. I still use lead solder and I don’t want to accidentally rub off any. Seems like a huge pain to wash my hand, get my laptop, change temp, then continue. But like you mentioned, I probably haven’t changed the temp on my iron in a while, ironically the last time I changed it was because I used silver solder.
Looks neat. I might have thought web features were cool ten years ago but no longer want any more devices with wifi and possibility of telemetry in my house. Not to mention having to bring up a browser to configure instead of pushing a physical button. No desire for limited Tesla-like design. Is that the case, or did I misunderstand?
I completely agree and love buttons and knobs. In this case, we didn't think the setting was necessary at all. It's very rare that you need to change the soldering temperature. We found that most of the reasons that people historically change their setting is because their iron isn't responsive enough to the actual workload.
With 100 Watts of power and an ultra-fast response time, you can flow the joules that you actually need into the material at the temperature you set.
Give it a try! If you still feel like you need a temperature knob, we'll refund your purchase.
We designed the system to work for people at a variety of price points. If you just buy the iron, you have access to all the settings in our web console: https://www.ifixit.com/fixhub/console The iron persists settings when you unplug it. You can change the sleep timer and timeout, set target temperatures, calibrate the accelerometer, and more. The Power Station is nice to have, but you don't lose any functionality w…