Neat Soldering Station Design Has Workshop & Portable Versions [Hackaday]

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The warm and rather stinky heart of any hacker’s lair is the soldering station, where the PCB meets the metal (solder). A good soldering station lets you get on with the business of building stuff without worrying about piffling details like temperature and remembering to turn the thing off. The AxxSolder is a neat design from [AxxAxx] that fulfills these criteria, as it includes full PID control of the iron and an auto sleep feature. It will run from any DC power source from 9 to 26 Volts, so you can run it off your bench power supply and have one less thing to plug in. There is even a portable version for those on-the-go hackathons.

It is built around an STM32G43 SoC twinned with a Waveshare 1.5-inch OLED display module, all stuffed into a 3d printed case. The business end is a JBC C210 or C245, which makes it compatible with most other soldering handles and cartridges out there. Plus, [AxxAxx] has done an excellent job of documenting the wiring, so you could easily hack this to another setup if required. [AxxAxx] has also made the wise  choice to make the portable and station versions of this setup use the same PCB and other parts, so it would be easy to build both at the same time: the only difference between the two is the 3D-printed case and the power connector.

The sleep mode is handled by sensing when the soldering head makes contact with a metal plate, indicating it is placed in the stand or in touch with the rest on the portable version. There’s also a customizable time-out, where the station shuts down if you don’t pick up the soldering handle after a certain amount of time. If you are one of those people (cough, me) who always forgets to turn the station off after use, this is a very useful feature.

[Via Hackster.io]