Sure! With the jbc C245 station I rarely went over 350 in any conditions, usually 320, while with T12, 360ºC is the start
Anyways, the heat shouldn't be a problem, if the solder barely melts, how is it going to heat the part so much?
Well, yes, if you have to put the tip in the pad for 30 seconds until it melts, that's not good.
I usually put a very small blob of solder and wait 2-3 seconds until it starts flowing and filling the hole / pad, then I add a second one, it will flow like butter in a frying pan.
But always making the main heat transfer spot in the the pad, not in the pin. On through-hole you'll definitely need to touch the pin, but again, I don't do it from the beginning, but when the solder has already filled the hole slighly.
This is all talking about these solid pads. 99% of solder operations are done a single touch.
Good news: It seems I found a way to remove these nasty spikes with new tips while yet providing fast response.
I mean, completely new tips will still have some weird behaviour, but not that extreme.
All by adding a simple "spike counter" and playing with the filtering factors. Only applying the heavy filtering is applied while in normal behaviour, and reducing it when the change is big, with 2 additional thresholds.
So in total there're 4 filtering levels:
- Diff lower than "Smooth start", considered normal noise. The filtering factor adjusted in system settings is applied (Heaviest filtering).
- Diff between "Smooth start" and "Smooth end" trigger excessive delay detection (tip heating or cooling too fast), so the factor is lowered to 2 to reduce the response time.
- Diff between "Smooth end" and "Reset_max": This is considered a spike, so it's counted and ignored for a maximum of 4 consecutive times, using normal filtering. I the counter hits the limit, reduce filtering to a factor of 1 for max. filtering response, but still provide some filtering.
- Diff higher than "Reset_max": Very huge change. This is usually when a tip is removed and /or put back. Completely reset the filter using factor 0, will override the filter data with the last reading.
This also seems to allow bigger filtering values. I've tried factor 4, seems to help a lot with these spikes, and didn't get any overshoot. So it's the default now.
I opened 2 new tips, and I was able "burn" them into working state in less than a minute.
Set 300ºC. It will oscillate a bit, maybe 280-320. It will progressively dampen, and after 10 seconds or so it will get stable. Sometimes you will get temp runaway error, just click the button and let it start again.
Repeat the procedure rising temps to ex. 370 and 450ºC and let it sit at least 15 seconds each time to ensure it's stable.
The tips are still very new and will do some little jumps when approaching the setpoint, but stay spot-on after that.
After few more changes I've gotten it to the point where I can put all the power onto the tip with only 6ºC difference (400ºC setpoint, 100% at 394ºC touching the wet sponge).
That was with my last tip, which I opened 15 minutes ago! It should behave like a wild beast, but seems to be under control.
Ksger v3 ram is 100.00% used! Adding anything else will require either sacrificing somewthing or huge changes in the code!
Updated builds!