Wet sanding (with appropriate sandpaper) makes a huge difference, especially for smaller grid sizes.
But it’s probably easier to just get some individual pieces from Bricklink.
Mine is the smallest one of a series of these, it has two heating elements inside.
I don’t have it for that long but I didn’t have problems so far, I’m usually only making rather small PCBs tho. I did make some recommended modifications like replacing the paper insulation tape with a kapton tape, proper grounding and flashed another firmware.
I did only use a small hotplate and/or a hotair station, so it seems to be definitely a stepup here 😌.
Yeah I have such a small, cheap Chinese one (T962) that I modified and flashed a nicer firmware on.
I basically populated the bottom side (with more components) first after applying solder past with a stencil, then reflowed the board. After cooling down I applied the solder paste to the upper side (with the LED) by using a small needle on a syringe (because using a stencil was too weird since the board wasn’t laying flat) but since the pads are relatively large and not that many that worked fine. Then I placed the components on that side and simply run the reflow cycle again.
I started with the bottom side because there are no heavy components. I expected heavy parts to just fall off on the second reflow cycle so I tried to avoid that.
At the end I manually assembled the USB connector using a regular soldering iron and tons of flux gel.
I’m currently working on a more complex project that uses double sided assembly (and a weird USB-C connector). To practice these things a little, I ordered some low cost boards to get used to that connector and explore double sided reflow (which seems easier than I expected).
For those who are interested, this is a reference design from framework computer for their expansion card system. It can be programmed with circuitpython or Arduino and utilises a SAMD21 microcontroller.
What would be nice is when instances could merge their communities so there aren’t many dedicated duplicates, like I could imagine there are for example LEGO-communities on 7 instances and the according owners of those communities could initiate that they want to merge with others so everyone can post wherever they are but have a common community-feed.
Ah, so I’m basically posting into foreign communities through my home-instance :).
I didn’t know there are major differences between the instances (like the voting system). I’m basically here because the join-page suggested lemmy.world 🤷🏻♂️. But I like it here :). Still haven’t fully understood how these instances work or work not together but I like that you don’t need accounts everywhere you want to post something. Is there a single server that handles user authentication or how do other instances know my account? 🧐
Say hello to Trixie :). She’s around eight years old and got here as a young kitten after being left in a cardboard box on the side of the road and my ex-girlfriend brought her here. Girlfriend of that time left, Trixie stayed and lives here since then.
I was feeling the same :D.
Boy, because of 500c you made me do all that? I was feeling like the Crimson Fleet treated me nicer here.