RoboTeam Twente: how the new soldering and desoldering station saves a lot of time and money

RoboTeam Twente is a multidisciplinary team of students from the University of Twente. The team consists of students from different backgrounds, such as Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science and Advanced Technology. From the 16th – 22nd of June the team will compete for the RoboCup 2018 in Montréal, Canada. SMANS and Kurz Ersa equipped the team with a multichannel soldering and desoldering station and the necessary tools. The RoboTeam Twente is very happy with the sponsors. In this blog the team relates how this equipment saves a lot of time and money. 

This year, RoboTeam Twente is making 12 soccer robots. These can drive around, shoot and even chip the ball over the opponent. The team has designed the electronics for the robots and is soldering everything by hand. Inside the soccer robot, the electronics handle the communication with the main computer and perform all the commands the robot receives. The electronics need to have a microcontroller on a 3.3V area, motor driving at 12V and a 300V circuit to kick the ball. Right now, the robots are in production phase, which means the team is soldering every Printed Circuit Board (PCB) fifteen times.

As stated before the soldering is done by hand, even the smallest components like the microcontrollers. A good soldering iron is essential to do the work quickly and effectively. The new soldering iron heats up in a few seconds, which is ideal for the RoboTeam to make small changes to the design. In the development phase, they had to discard parts quite often. The desoldering station enables the team to replace broken components with ease. Besides, it also helps remove expensive components from an old prototype. This way they save a lot of money by placing the used components on a new PC

RoboTeam Twente: “We are very happy with both the soldering iron and desoldering station. The new soldering iron is a big improvement from our old iron and greatly increased the production speed. Still, the desoldering station has the biggest impact on our work, because replacing components is now a matter of seconds. Before we had the station, desoldering a microcontroller from a PCB was really hard to do. Most times the traces on the PCB would break, rendering the whole board useless. With the new desoldering station, we heat up the microcontroller and just slide it off the PCB.”

Sponsored products by SMANS NV and Kurz Ersa:

1X 0IC1200A Ersa Icon Nano complete with holder and tip 0102CDLF16
1X 0ICV2000AXV Ersa Icon Vario 2 multichannel soldering and desoldering station (with 1X Hot air tool & 1X desoldering tool)

Click here for more information on the products or contact SMANS NV.

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