Today we designed the block diagram for our system and develop some theories to better understand the project. The upper heating elements and the lower heating elements of the oven will be connected to our AC circuit by passing through a relay, which we’ll use as a switch to control the oven. The thermocouple will act as a temperature measurement to send the temperature data (which is an analog signal) of the oven to the A/D convertor...

1. http://www.instructables.com/id/Hack-a-Toaster-Oven-for-Reflow-Soldering/?ALLSTEPS This is a very detailed project that basically gives us step-by-step of what to do for this project. In order to control the oven’s temperature, he created his own controller circuit implementing a ATmega32U4 micro-controller to monitor the oven’s temperature  using thermocouple and AD595AQ, and then control the oven’s heating element using a...

Next step I’ll define the all the functions that we need for our system, list out the the possible options for each function and the pros and cons utilizing each of them. I/A way to control the oven with low voltage digital signal (the switch): In order to control the behavior of our oven so that it follows our set-up temperature profile, we need to put a device which helps us control our circuit with low-power signal, or in other word we...

This project of transforming a toaster oven into a solder reflow oven is quite common and has been attempted by many people. By doing some research on the internet, I found many webpages that describe the past researches on this project and I picked a couple of them which I think are very helpful and informative: Resources: 1. http://www.instructables.com/id/Hack-a-Toaster-Oven-for-Reflow-Soldering/?ALLSTEPS 2....

I spent this whole day researching on the different types of solder paste and tried to find an appropriate solder paste that we can use for our experiment. Basically, solder paste is used to connect the leads of surface mount integrated chip packages to attachment points on a printed circuit board. The composition of solder paste varies, depending on the intended uses. Some properties of solder paste are: Viscosity: The degree to which the...

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...