Thursday, February 16, 2012

Preparing for a lot of hot air

I'm (very) gradually tooling up to be able to rework SMT and BGA devices on circuit boards. I've got a hot air station now, and some BGA type liquid flux, and have a preheater, hot air gun holder, and board holder on the long-range radar. Maybe someday I'll save up for them... Until then, I've got a toaster oven for preheating and making out humidity and such things.

My hot air station is the Aoyue 968A+. Relatively inexpensive for that sort of thing, and has a vacuum pen tool for moving around little SMT devices. Also has a soldering iron, but I'd rather that was a tweezer iron, and I do hope to order a tweezer to put in its place at some point. I already have a soldering iron that I'm pretty happy with, and would rather have a tweezer that would make some things like the AmigaOneXE DMA fix easier to do than holding my iron in one hand and my desoldering iron in the other hand and try to maneuver things that way without hurting myself. A holder would also be nice for the air gun so I can have hands free to drive pickup tweezers and vacuum pickup tools.

For my first projects, I intend to play with a couple old broken cell phones to get a feel for things, and then move on to removing parts from Mac G4 processor modules, and a similar AmigaOneXE module, for the purpose of mapping the Megarray connectors and perhaps work out an adapter between them. This project can be seen here.

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