Today I designed my own webpage for this summer project. I created a page call “Transforming a Toaster Oven into a Solder Reflow Oven” which summarizes the main purpose and goal of this research. I will write a post everyday for 8 weeks describing what I experiment and report the achieved results.

After finish working on the webpage, I worked on checking our toaster oven’s working ability. Based on the instruction, our toaster oven can reach the maximum temperature of 450 Fahrenheit, which is roughly about 232 Celcius. Therefore, this roaster can basically provide enough heat for us to use as a solder reflow oven. But different from the toaster oven, the industrial solder oven normally takes a very short time to get to the maximum temperature. Hence, I used the thermometer to see how long this oven takes to get to the maximum temperature, with all 3 different modes: Bake, Broil and Toast.

I used 20 data points for each graph corresponding to a total of 20 minutes. Based on my experiment, I figured that in toast mode and broil mode, the oven can actually reach to a maximum temperature higher than 450F (around 475F) while in bake mode, it cannot reach to 450F (only around 442F). But assuming that the highest temperature is 450F, based on the graphs above, we can clearly see that the toast function gives us the most efficient heat-transferring with significant lower time to get to this value, compared to the other two functions. In toast mode, it takes around 8 minutes to get to the maximum temperature, while the broil mode takes 16 minutes and the bake mode can only reach 442 after 12 minutes. But nevertheless, even in the optimal solution, our toaster oven still takes much more time than what is achieved using a solder reflow oven (from 3.5 to 5.0 minutes*). Therefore, we need to figure out way to enhance the heat transferring efficiency of our toaster oven.

*Resources: http://hobbybotics.com/projects/hobbybotics-reflow-controller-v8-03/