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Aroma Hotplate

This page documents my heat profiling experiment with a $20 Aroma hotplate. The hotplate takes about 3 minutes to hit melting temperature, but quickly heats to burning temperature, and the heat is uneven. So, keep the board moving so it heats evenly, and be prepared to remove it from the hotplate when it's done. So, it's about 40 seconds to do the whole outer ring if you don't move the board around. Moving it around would shorten the elapsed time by making the temperature more even, so everything hits the melting temperature together. We hope. Note: for those of you who are unfamiliar with reflow soldering, the second movie shows what happens when the paste melts. There's no uncertainty about it when it happens.

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