I did see the one that you have in your driver thread. Seems really nice. I cannot seem to find one similar other than this line of cell phone repair things that work with 110V. Was the one you bought not powerful enough? Chinese watts
The key for me was to get close to 1°C per second heat up speed
The plate has its original power with 3 heat elements
I used a normal upper router and belt grinder to get the 15mm plate down to 12mm taking a lot off the lower side to reduce its thermal mass
then adding 6 heat elements I had laying around that get screwed on the plate bottom
the original power was more like 0.4°C per second heat up
That makes a lot of sense. I have never been that precise with any of my reflows. This would be my first way into semi “correct” way to do it with temperature control. I am also not making drivers so I wonder if I need to be so spot on with ramp times.
I wonder how hard would it be to control it with a computer.
Then you could easily program the entire reflow profile, better than $50 hot plates…
Someone else has thought about doing a custom MCU-controlled hotplate:
The one I have with that controller is nice
If you change heat elements or other characteristics you can let it do a calibration run very easy to use
You can manual edit like 10 parameters but that is beyond my capabilities as there is no documentation on it
Yeah, but $80 shipped + the cost of modding make it a not-so-cheap option.
I see it on Taobao for $40 + agent fees + shipping. Likely cheaper, but still not cheap…
And it still doesn’t support programming entire reflow profiles, does it?
I still find my ‘manual PID regulation’ of my heatblock very sufficient for the task of reflowing, and it is easy and cheap. Just the (12V rated) heat-elements connected to an adjustable power supply and measure the temperature with a IR thermometer (the side of the block is painted matt black). After a few sessions I know that the voltage set to 2.8V is great for normal reflows, if an entire flashlight head is heated (the E2L ledboard can not be removed, so to reflow new leds I heat up the complete head), I set the voltage to 3.2V.
Would this one work? It’s cheap. YOUYUE LCD Screen Separator Machine
Or this one UYUE 946C 110/220V 850W 5.5 inch Electronic Hot Plate
EDIT : click on pix
Have you got link for this one X3??
Click on the pic
Thank you. . :+1:
Okay, the keywords to find those sweet hot plates seem to be : “LED remover plate”
I can’t check on Ali, but it’s a bit cheaper on ebay already
Or you can get an adjustable temperature one
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/UYUE-110-220-V-Mobilephone-Built-in-Pump-Vacuum-Metal-Body-Glass-LCD-Screen-Separator-Machine/32801227476.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.7b654c4ddKdQ9c
Thanks a lot guys.
I won’t have to use my big hot plate anymore for reflowing.
Most recently I’ve been using a copper disc and my soldering iron. I put the MCPCB (or just a driver PCB) on the disc, and press the tip of my iron against the plate, rotating it a few times to get it to heat more evenly. Next time I’m going to (kapton) tape a thermocouple to the disc so I can track the temperature more carefully, and try and manage a ramp and soak.
For those that haven’t seen this here is a link to djozz’s home made reflow plate mentioned above.
I can’t believe it has temperature control built in the hot part (but perhaps a simple bi-metal switch) , the alu is thin, and 300W is absurd for a small hotplate. I do like that blue one a lot a few posts down from it though. Or build your own for less than 10 dollar, as Steve suggested 
I already built mine like you did Djozz, I just saw that in the new products section of BG so I thought it was interesting.
Here’s mine :
