The Tech Blog

Got this little beauty of a hotplate/Reflow Plate from Miniware(MHP30 PD). Brilliantly designed in a tiny form factor. Runs on a USB C 65W DC Power Charging block from AC supply. Capable of going up to 350°C on the ceramic hotplate. For reflowing small PCBs, I think it’s more than capable. I would mostly be using this for removing or reworking ICs from boards. Wouldn’t have to deal with flying capacitors and resistors everywhere doing the same with a hot air gun.

It has LED indicators to show different temperature ranges in the heat cycle. The only issue I see is balancing PCBs to be placed on this unit. The bed size is very small(30mm x 30mm). I would probably need to design some other support structure around it to hold it in place. The Ceramic plate is removable so I think Miniware might design larger area heat plates in the future compatible with the same base.

Edit: Tried it out for a few months. It’s simply great for soldering small boards. No issues till date.

Finally getting around to fully explore the RP2040 Pico board. It’s been in the cupboard for far too long. Chip is 133MHz (Overclockable to 400MHz) dual-core ARM Cortex M0+ with 30 GPIOs, 4 ADCs, 264KB SRAM and built-in USB 1.1 support. Earlier this week, they opened up the RP2040 chip to the general public for purchase for $1 for a one-off unit. I am sure the price will drop to $0.65 in bulk in a few months. This makes it the cheapest chip out there in its M0+ performance class (Let me know if you find cheaper ones than those with similar performance). Since it’s from the Raspberry Pi Foundation community support is here to stay for a long time. Considering these, I am inclined to put it into production designs once chip availability eases up, for non-connectivity-based projects.

There is a big problem though, it doesn’t have onboard flash memory to store your code in, so you would need to have an external flash memory (up to 16MB) always next to the chip. This will add to the cost. The board wouldn’t be that cheap anymore but still will be promising.

Let me know your thoughts on this.