Electronics Projects General - DIY, Repair, and Help

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I keep a butane torch with a solder iron attachment in the toolbox for field work up on a ladder. I got it at harbor freight a million years ago. I had an AliExpress $4 USB solder iron for a bit but it couldn't get enough heat for any joint larger than the head of a needle.

For shop work, I have a Weller station with temperature presets I dumpster-dived for that was built when Christ was a cowboy. I've needed to upgrade that for over a decade. The connection between the base and the tip is busted and uses a proprietary cannon plug. I keep thinking "this is the last job with this" but you know how that goes.

For making a quick butt joint in the field, I'm a fan of crimp connectors. Those are vibration-resistant and can take loads of current. My new favorite are the heat-shrink style with a dab of solder you can melt with a hot air gun. I also have a lot of these with spade connectors which is great for troubleshooting before you zap it with the hot air and make the connection more permanent. Molex is more professional. Deutch connectors looks cool and apparently work extremely well if you shell out for the name brand kit
 
Anyone know if there is a two wire communication + power protocol yet, capable of 1Mbit? I was hoping that Power Over CAN may have been a thing, but it is not.
 
Blue Miaplacidus said:
Thank you for this, I cannot believe how good this tiny little iron is. It's even better than the iron on my chinkshit station. I have been using garbage for a long time I guess, the difference is insane.
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The Pinecil is great, but the TS101 is better. It uses the same USB-C power delivery and can run the same open source firmware IronOS that the Pinecil does.

If you ever want an upgrade look into the TS101
 
Torque Wheeler said:
Why does a soldering iron need an operating system?
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It's not an operating system, it's just open source firmware that drives things like the OLED display, power delivery, USB-C power negotiation, temperature control, motion wake, etc.. https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS

It's hard if not impossible to do those things without a microcontroller inside. That's why the TS101 and similar are so portable and can use literally anything as a power source with USBC power delivery.
 
Blue Miaplacidus said:
Double posting but I am looking for a recommendation for a portable soldering iron. I have some random chink station that I have used for years and a bunch of 5$ throwaway irons for melting plastic and stupid shit. I never had a need for a portable/usb iron, but now that I am flying quads much more often I really need something that I can throw in my bag so I do not have to travel all the way home to fix a single pigtail that got ripped out.

I was looking at this one which is apparently a popular one that was rebranded by this RC company. I do not know if it is any good. I was only considering it because it comes with an xt60 adapter so I could power it with one of my quad lipos.
View attachment 9007693
It does not need to be amazing, I just want something that works and heats reliably long enough to attach a wire or two in the field.
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Just get a butane soldering iron. They are all I use anymore, since it's impossible to leave on overnight, it has no cord to tangle up, they don't need any electronics inside, and charging it with more gas only takes seconds. The only downside is you have to buy cans of butane, but a can should last for 12 hours of soldering AT LEAST. Also, in very tight spaces, the exhaust from the flame is very hot, and can burn and melt nearby plastic, which is something to be aware of. It does make a nice heat gun for heat shrink tubing though.
 
Anyone know the infodump on B-grade solar cells? The seem like they're either an amazing deal for not-quite QC-passing panels, or simply awful things that will never meet spec.

what's going on with these?
 
srppsoidteerr said:
Just get a butane soldering iron
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Someone else suggested butane as well but so far the pinecil has been serving me well. I grabbed a little xt60 to barrel jack so I can power it off my quad lipos and it has already earned its keep. Smashed my 7" quad into concrete and ripped off the pigtail, would have had to drive 4 hours home to replace it previously. Was able to do it in 10 mins at the abandoned munitions factory instead.

Built two more micro quads as well;
IMG_20260610_232131920_HDR~2.jpg
Although I need to get some more RHCP mini u.fl antenna to replace these shitty tiny little dipoles.
 
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Torque Wheeler said:
Are there any good knock-off DJI minis yet?
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Yes, but don't hold me to this as I know almost nothing about the gps stabilized drones. It depends on where you live; in the US DJI is using a front company to get around their bans, skyrover is not only DJI clones, it's a DJI company. They're much cheaper than the DJI equivalent, but uses the same cameras, same sensors, same flight controller, same software everything, they just renamed it to skyrover and incorporated in America. Potemsic (sp) Atom2 is also supposedly a good mini drone.

What I cannot wait for is for HGLRC and sky zone to release their standalone artlynk VRX. DJI has a monopoly essentially on digital camera systems for FPV. Their air units are light years ahead of the competition, except they're crazy expensive. The air unit cost more than the parts to build a quad. However artlynk is open source, and betafpv released a digital camera and VRX for 35$. It doesn't have the latency of a DJi air unit, yet, but 35$ compared to 280$ is a no-brainer. The only problem is right now to use that budget digital system you have to buy their betafpv box goggles, it currently does not work with anything else, and most pilots already have multiple pairs of goggles. (The betafpv goggles are also shit).

At a fpv show in China they revealed their standalone VRX, the draco system, which will allow anyone with goggles with an HDMI input to take advantage of the open source artlynk protocol. It's huge news in the fpv space. I cannot wait to convert all my shitty analog quads to sweet sweet digital.
 
DavidS877 said:
The first Kiwi Farms(tm) PCB. Ok, fine, it's not official, but the Kiwi makes a good sample object.
View attachment 8942090
The bit is cutting a little rougher than I'd like so I probably need to run another feed+speed test or try a different bit. But I think this one will work for testing.
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So, it turns out, I may be retarded.

I was having all sorts of problems as mentioned previously in this thread keeping stuff level. Turns out it's a me problem.

The workflow: 1. Probe the workpiece. 2. Click the shiny "Autolevel" button to update the code. 3. Run the code.
In a few places in the bCNC documentation I'd seen notes about not "double leveling", fine, I won't click the shiny button twice.

What they actually mean is don't click it at all. It's meant to update the code so you can save it. bCNC when you have a probe mesh loaded automatically corrects the GCODE as it's sent to the CNC. So by clicking the button you're now correcting it twice. So a -0.5mm cut with a 0.25mm offset should be -0.25 mm, but it's now at Z=0.
I just kicked off the big PCB and wouldn't you know, even with the variations in crappy Chinese PCBs it's doing pretty well. Runout is still a bit high, but at least the height map is solid now.
 
It's here....
2026-06-22_16-38.png
After getting my mill totally working. I ordered the boards from both China and Oshpark, the Oshpark ones I ordered a couple days earlier and they aren't here yet. China took exactly a week. Ordered 15th, arrived 22nd.
Sharp eyed readers may notice a little bit missing, like I haven't actually soldered anything yet. I should have bumped the size a bit when I decided to order them, but I think all connectors are reachable. I also forgot to move the one small SMT cap to the top side as well, but I did at least do a ground fill on the top which should make everything very happy. I'm totally looking forward to soldering all those fucking connectors. And then crimping the wires that attach to them.
 
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