Baking with Surface Mount

This was the kit. The tweezers were very useful.

Today we got around to actually using my little oven. I’d bought a syringe with solder paste, some tweezers, a bunch of switches and a bunch of leds to solder in place. First step was to solder put solder paste on all the connection pads. This involved squirting the paste out of the syringe onto the board, and then using the tweezers to place a component on each pad. Pro-tip, hold the syringe like you were going to stab someone with it, and then use your thumb to force out the solder. There’s a delay between you pressing the plunger and the solder coming out, so give a quick pulse of a squeeze and then wait for something to arrive at the end of the needle. If you squeeze continuously you get a stream of solder, and you don’t want that.

I was a bit stingy with my solder paste, which meant that I never got the magical “surface tension” moment where the components swing into place. Instead mine drifted around a bit.

I also got a temperature gun to check the temperature of the oven plate, but this didn’t work well because the cover is shiny. In the end we just set the temperature to 170 degrees and popped the board on for 20 seconds. Stuff melted, but there was a pleasing lack of smoke and funny smells.

This is what it looked like when it was finished…

The image above might not be correct. Actually it looked pretty tidy and all the components were stuck on the board. Next step is to solder the PICO on the reverse of the board and then test everything.