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eSol
Published on Wednesday, 25 July 2012 08:21
Written by Daniel
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I always liked good quality soldering tools, even though I currently have a nice ELV 50 Watts digital soldering station, I decided to build my own soldering base station
using an existing WPS80 soldering iron manufactured by Weller. After looking on the net to see others DIY projects I decided to develop a different one, with several
improvements in the design.

The main criteria for the design was that the device should be very compact, since I don't like big boxes on my crowdy workbench. Therefore I selected a small enclosure
available from Hammond manufacturer and designed the PCB to fit inside the box without many adaptations. As you can see in the pictures bellow the main component is
the big trafo (100VA toroid 2x24V); the electronics occupies a small fraction of the available space.
The electronic circuit was designed with several aspects in mind; first it should be fairly simple for anyone to build (as few components as posisible), even if it uses SMD
components. Secondly, the reduced size of the electronic circuit is mainly achieved by using a power MOSFET transistor without the need of an additional heat-sink.
Most of the DIY (and comercial) soldering stations that I found on the Internet used triac + driver topology for the heater but that solution needs extra heatsink for the
power triac. These solutions have an advantage however, the commonly used driver chip is an opto-triac driver (eg. MOC3041) which is simple to drive and has
additional 'zero-crossing' detection logic available.

The core component of the schematic is the ATMEGA164 type AVR micro-controller specially selected for PGA circuitry it has for ADC differential channels. This
important feature avoids the need of an external OPAMP used to amplify the signal from temperature sensor (PTC in Weller's case). The temp-to-voltage conversion is
handled by an constant current circuit implemented with LM1117 LDO chip, this ensures great linearity of the PTC readings. The logic power supply uses an SPMS
circuit LM2674 which means we can directly use power trafo outputs (24VAC with full wave rectifier and capacitive filter). Of course the SMPS does not need a heatsink
either ;).
The user interface is simple enough, I purposely selected an 3xDigits LED display since it has nice contrast ratio in almost every illumination conditions. For temperature
setting I selected a cheap rotary encoder which greatly simplifies the operation modes.

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As you can see from the pictures the display board directly plugs into the "main board" with no additional airwires, further more the main PCB is single side routed with
very few airwires.

BOM
Here is a simplified list of important components (not so commonly available) of the project

Component Description Remarks

HM-1455N1201 Aluminium enclosure box A:120mm; B:53mm; C:103mm
TTS100/Z230/24-24V 2x24V toroidal trafo, 100VA, 2x2.08A, 230VAC Breve Tufvassons, 100VA type
ED16112O Rotary encoder 24 pulses/rotation, 24 dents
ZL263-16DG 2x8 pins connector, right angle Used on LED display daugther board
BC56-12SRWA LED display, 3 digits, common cathode Kingbright Electronic
AMPHENOL, 7-poles, circular connector
C091-3437-000 Circular connector, 7poles used for soldering iron plug, modified by
cutting a new key opening near pin 7

The equally important part of the project is the software, which implements the temperature controlling loop (PID with anti-windup) and the user interface. The output
control is synchronized with the mains frequency (50Hz here in Europe), by using an "zero cross" simple circuit in order to minimize the commutation noise and associated
EMC problems. The ADC reads the PTC sensor during OFF time of MOSFET PWM and the samples are massively averaged (moving average filter), this greatly
increases the readings stability and accuracy.

Short changelog:

SW4.0: eSol_Software_V4.0.zip : Decimal dot used as heater activity indicator. OS improvements

SW3.0: eSol_Software_V3.0.zip use it for HW3.0: IC4=LM1117IMP-ADJ/NOPB, R2=47R, R3=1K12
Improved PTC range, calibrated temperature/voltage transfer curve
SW2.0: eSol_software_V2.0.zip use it for HW2.0 IC4=LM1117M-1.8/NO, R2=150R, R3=1K5
Added standby mode, display routines cleanup/optimizations
SW1.0: initial version

If you are not interested to modify/improove the software functionality you can directly flash the provided hex file into the microcontroller. Be sure that you change the
following fuse bits settings:

uncheck CKDIV8 since it comes activated by Atmel

disable the JTAGEN which also comes activated by Atmel (fail to do so you will see several missing segments on LED display)

eSol_v4.hex

The project results are very encouraging, the temperature is maintained in between few Celsius degree range, the heating time is very fast (comparable to Weller's
soldering base stations) and the overall device size is smaller than the original equipment.

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Here is a side by side comparation with Weller device:

Here is a short video of eSol running:

License
The software of the project is free to use even for comercial purposes, subject to the GPLv3 license.

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Eosystems @2012

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